



mi% \ 




BARON STEU 



WASHINGTON TAKING THE OATH AS PRESIDENT, 

APRIL 30, 1789, ON THE SITE OF THE PRESENT TREASURY BUILDING, WALL STREET, NEW YORK CITY. 

Virginia gave us this imperial man, 

Cast in the massive mould 

Of those high-statured ages old 1 

Which into grander forms our mortal metal ran ; 



Mother of States and undiminished men, X 
Thou gavest us a Country, giving h 



■James Russell Lowell. 



A TOPICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. 

FOOTPRINTS 



OF 



FOUR CENTURIES 

THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 



COMPRISING THE IMPORTANT EVENTS, EPISODES, AND INCIDENTS WHICH 

MARE UP THE MARVELOUS RECORD FROM COLUMBUS 

TO THE PRESENT TIME. 

BY HAMILTON W. MABIE, LL.B., Lit.D., 



ASSISTED BY THE FOLLOWING NOTED AUTHORITIES, WHO HAVE 
WRITTEN SPECIAL DEPARTMENTS: 

HON. JOHN SHERMAN AND HON. J. K. UPTON, U. S. SENATOR HENRY L. DAWES, 

BISHOP JOHN H. VINCENT, MISS FRANCES E. WILLARD, COL. A. K. McCLURE, 

HON. WM. C. BRECKINRIDGE, TROF. FRANCIS N. THORPE, Ph.D., 

PROF. T. S. DOOLITTLE, TL.D , ALBERT SHAW, LL.D., AND OTHERS. 



WITH OVER 3X0 ILLUSTRATIONS, 

MOSTLY BY NOTED AMERICAN ARTISTS. 






• MA* 10 1894 .1 

<L OF WK% 



INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 

PHILADELPHIA. CHICAGO. 

1.894- 



Copyright, 1894, 

BY 

\V. B. SCULL. 

ALL R1GH fS RESERVED. 






EVERY CHAPTER IN THIS VOLUME BEING ORIGINAL MATTER PREPARED EXPRESSLY 
FOR THIS WORK, ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT TO INFRINGE UPON OUR COPYRIGHT BY 
USING EITHER THE MATTER OR THE PICTURES, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION. 




rnWARD THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON. 



NTRODUCTION. 




T is four hundred years since Columbus caught his first glimpse 
of the western world, but it is only two hundred and seventy five 
years since the work of making this continent habitable began. 
From Jamestown and from Plymouth the streams of exploration 
^ and colonization flow steadily westward and southward, gathering 
volume and momentum until they unite the great oceans and cover 
the continent. The story of this vast unfolding of life under new 
conditions is told in this volume by different pens, but with one 
controlling idea — to show how and by what means a great nation grew out of the 
few and scattered seeds of a small emigration from beyond the sea. The great 
English statesman, Burke, has said somewhere that to be a statesman one must 
not only master the different conditions and occupations of a people, but must so 
realize them through his imagination that he sees in them one unbroken life. 
This volume has been prepared in the hope that it will present the life of the 
American people so clearly, vividly and comprehensively that the unity and 
magnitude of that life will be more evident than they have ever been before. 
A great people in a great country has so many occupations, so many kinds of 
wealth, such differences of condition, that it loses at times the consciousness of 
its family ties and affections. There are so many kinds of Americans, they are 



vi THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

so widely scattered, and they are busy with such manifold interests, that the 
homestead is in great danger of being neglected by the children, and the sense 
of kinship is likely to be lost in the diversity of interests. 

We talk a great deal about our power but we do not realize it ; we cannot 
realize it until we understand what it is which gives us power. We use a great 
many figures to convey an impression of our acreage and crops ; but it is the 
farmer, the mechanic and the merchant who are the real capital of the country. 
Their character, energy, intelligence, thrift and practical sagacity constitute our 
real wealth ; the wealth which is not subject to the fluctuations of the market or 
the untimely conditions of the weather. This volume tells the story of material 
growth as fully and more comprehensively than most books ; but it tells also the 
story of America as it is written in the life, character and habits of the American 
man and woman. 

To know the American you must know his ancestry and how he came where 
he now is ; that record is made here with a broad completeness which brings out 
the immense variety and volume of race force and character behind the people 
on this continent. To know the American you must know what religious, social 
and political influences shaped and moulded the lives of his forefathers ; those 
influences are all marked and traced here. To know the American of to-day 
you must know what experiences have befallen him on this side the ocean, how 
he has fared and what he has accomplished ; accordingly his history is fully 
spread out in these pages, and his explorations, settlements, wars, growth are 
told, not in detail but so as to cover the ground strongly and effectively. To 
know the American you must know what he is doing to-day ; where his work is 
and how he does it ; how he travels ; what inventions he uses ; what mechanical 
genius he displays ; what books he reads ; what church he attends ; what schools 
he maintains ; what his pleasures are ; and how he employs his wealth. This 
volume answers these questions. It is at once a history, a story, an encyclopaedia 
of national information, and a text-book of national character. It reports travels, 
describes settlements, gives account of wars, traces political ideas and growth, 
follows the lines of trade and of national prosperity, pictures what is going on in 
the shop, the office, the church, the school, the mine, the garden, the grain field, 
the home. It supplies the historic background of American life, and against this 
background it spreads out that life in broad, clear lines of growth and activity. 
It is the story of America, but it is still more the story of the American. Well- 
done or ill-done, it aims at nothing less than to show the American as he lives 
and works on the continent which he has conquered by sheer force of energy 
and intelligence. 

There is no romance so marvelous as this record of fact ; none so full of 
incident, adventure, heroism, and human vicissitude. From the voyages of the 
earliest Spanish, French, and English explorers to the inventions and discoveries 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

of Edison the story never fails of thrilling interest. It is a romance of humanity 
written by the hand of Providence on the clean, broad page of a new continent. 
It is a Bible for new illustration of the old laws of right and wrong which underlie 
all history ; but it is a modern version of The Arabian Nights for marvels and 
miraclesof human skill and achievements. The building of Aladdin's palace 
was a small affair compared with the building of some of our States ; and 
the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp was but a faint burnishing compared with 
the glow of prosperity which hard work has brought out on the face of this 
continent. There is no romance so wonderful as the story ot life told, not by 
novelists of varying degrees of skill, but by great multitudes of eager, ener- 
getic men and women. It is doubtful if any country has ever developed 
greater energy of spirit or greater variety of character than this ; and this is 
the chief reason why our history has such significance and such fruitage of 
achievement. 

To know this history is a duty and a delight. A man whose brave ancestors 
have carried the name he bears far, and made it a synonym for courage and 
honor, is rightly proud of his descent and gets from it a new impulse to bear as 
brave a part in his own day. Americans can honestly cherish such pride ; it is 
justified by what lies behind them. No man can be truly patriotic who does not 
know something of the nation to which he belongs, and of the country in which 
he lives. Such knowledge is a part of intelligent citizenship. In this country, 
where the government rests on the intelligence and virtue of the entire popula- 
tion, such a knowledge is a duty and a necessity. Men who reach eminence in 
their professions invariably have large ideas of those professions ; they know the 
history of the profession and the names of those who have advanced its influence 
and secured its honors. A man of business who takes the lead in his particular 
line of trade is uniformly distinguished by his superior knowledge of business 
problems and conditions. He studies his business in its large relations to the 
business of the country ; he looks at it with the eyes of a statesman. The 
intelligent American cannot be ignorant of the great history in which he has had 
so vital an interest, or of the life of his country to-day. Not to know these 
things is to miss a noble and inspiring landscape which we might see simply 
by the lifting up of the eyes. 

It is for the family that this volume was primarily prepared. America is 
pre-eminently the country of homes ; that is the country which, by its frer 
institutions and its large social and industrial conditions, makes comfortable 
homes possible to its entire population. These homes are not only the sources 
of happiness and the nurseries of purity and prosperity ; they are also the 
schools of citizenship. From these schools are graduated year after year, in 
unbroken and never-ending classes, the men and women who continue and 
enlarge the work and the influence of the nation. The Bible has been and will 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

lain the great te.t-book in these ■**=J^ b ^ of *SrS and 
*is book aims to take * . , ace « mdispen ab^b ^ ^ ^ ^ 
entertainment. The h story of a race s tn P and ^ ^ fay 

tion of the children of that la * We know t y ^ rf ^ 

instinct when we hold up constantly thelives a ,. ■ so effective 

me „ as illustrations of honor, honesty and capacity Notea-tag 

as tha , which flows from £%^Z%££Z*%*<**™*«. 
principles and statements. Few boys care I the Mmes of 

bnt every boy knows on the instant *P«» men ,. ender 

Washington and Lincoln are spoken in hs heating * h sacrifice and 
through character an even higher service than Render 

action. They embody great "^ ' S ' t ?J st ^soeak wifli voices whose range 
illustrate noble qualities. Being dead they St 11 pea k . 

Shm'teacn*: England Has ever had ^^-^^^^ 
the nobles, traits of English manhood the g = andes ">P e g of ufc whlle he 

To tell his story to a boy ,s to teach , tan tl e deepest es so 
does not suspect anything more enduring ^J^£™Z* every decisive 
History is summed up in ^ -^ ^^IS great Jan. The 
-^A vX-„ tttst familiar ^£^-,£3. 
r l^ rf ^^"1S^«ll^r*« air because they 

^t;ttard° S Srr r r?e q u^r,t^ roo^and they are of 

-":! ^ :;;;»: a^to^nations of antiqoity * repeat to each fresh 
g eneIX S the nclie deeds of their ^ancestors. thus making history a grea oral 
tradition, and turning it from a dead record mto: a lving r Jte 

*t ls or r stfc rf -^£sE^ &* - — - 

an!, L^netlhe best materia, for the education ^ tra,nsone.n con, 
age, honesty, and energy as well as m men ml q™*£V~£ took the place of 
boys learned Homer by hear. ; the Ihad and Odyssey P^ ^ 

the pile of books which the school-boy of to-day caries ^ 

se ts his - morning face sc hoolwa d. In tins ™y y their 

eloquence of speech, and imb.bed .he spirt, of art ^ ^ > 
.antes. But they learned even greater things than these they ^g P ^ 
the heroes of their race and took part in their great deeds. 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

most poetic things which their race had done were familiar and became dear to 
them while their natures were most receptive and responsive. The past was 
not dim and obscure to them as it is to too many Americans ; it was a living- 
past, full of splendid figures and heroic deeds. To boys so bred in the very 
arms and at the very heart of their race it was a glorious privilege to be an 
Athenian ; to share in a noble history, to be a citizen of a beautiful city, to have 
the proud consciousness of such place and fame among men. It is not surpris- 
ing that as the result of such an education the small city of Athens produced 
more great men in all departments in the brief limits of a century than most 
other cities have bred in the long course of history. There was a vital, inspir- 
ing education behind that splendid flowering of art, literature, philosophy and 
statesmanship. 

The American boy and girl ought to have the same education. Too many 
grow up with the most indefinite ideas of their own country. They do not 
know what has been done here ; they do not even know how people live in 
other parts of the broad land. They know something of their own commu- 
nities, but they are ignorant of the greater community to which they belong. 
The story of the country's birth and growth, of its struggles and achievements, 
of its wonderfully diversified life, of its heroic men and noble women, ought to 
be familiar to every boy and girl from earliest childhood. This knowledge is 
the A B C of real education. It is to furnish this knowledge that this volume 
has been largely prepared. The home is never isolated and solitary ; it is one 
of a great community of homes stretching across the continent. To get the 
best and the most out of its beautiful relations and its manifold opportunities, 
each home must develop the sense of kinship with other homes, and the con- 
sciousness of common responsibility. Every child must fill a place in the 
nation and the world as well as in the home. He must know, therefore, what 
the nation is and what it demands of him. He must feel the deep and wonder- 
ful life, active and powerful over a whole continent, in which he shares and to 
which he contributes. 

This is the age of community feeling ; the sense of brotherhood among men 
of all races has never before been so pervasive and so real. A famine on the 
banks of the Volga brings quick response from the prosperous fields about the 
Mississippi. Nothing that happens in the remotest corner of the world is with- 
out interest. To know how the other half lives is not only a universal desire, 
but a universal duty. This volume not only makes the present acquainted with 
the past and so gives its historic background, but it brings to each occupation 
and profession the work and condition of every other occupation and profession, 
and it lays before each section of the country the aspects and habits of every 
other section. It is a national book ; it describes the West to the East and the 
North to the South. It tells the merchant how the farmer lives ; it gives the 



x THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

mechanic a picture of the miner's life ; it furnishes the planter a glimpse 
of the herdsman. It unfolds a map of the whole country, not in the hard 
and fast lines of geography, but in the streaming, rushing life of an 
inmense and energetic people. It supplies a clear and comprehensive view of 
the government in all its functions of administration ; it describes the great cities ; 
it follows and pictures the countless channels and instrumentalities of travel and 
commerce : it delineates the work of the farmer, the mechanic, the miner, the 
merchant ; it has something to say about churches, colleges, schools, literature, 
charities. It is, in a word, a national chart, text-book, history and romance for 
the home. 

In the preparation of this volume we have had the assistance of a number 
of experienced writers specially qualified to present the subjects assigned to 
them. This co-operation of knowledge and work was not only necessitated by 
the magnitude and comprehensiveness of a book covering a period of four hun- 
dred years and embracing all the aspects, — historical, religious, industrial, social, 
and intellectual, — of the nation's life, but was deliberately chosen because it en- 
sured greater variety, interest, and thoroughness than any single author could give 
such a work. Its advantages were recognized as counterbalancing the additional 
expense involved. We have, however, planned the entire work, and, with the 
exception of the chapters which are signed by their writers, have outlined and 
thoroughly revised every part we have not ourselves written, thus securing 
unity of aim and purpose throughout. 

Hamilton W. Mabie. 

Marshal H. Bright. 




•A\0DEL OF 

U.S.AIan op War 

•BuiLt- fOR- qcHibit- at- Wo^LosFair 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 5 



CHAPTER I. 

FINDING THE NEW COUNTRY 



discovery and discoverers the norsemen' did they discover america? the evidence — 

conclusions — columbus — earlv years — characters of his time — leaves italy for por- 
tugal his plan sees the kino the king's indifference visits spain a true 

1 kiend — disappointment and delay ferdinand— his coolness po columbus's project — 

isabella exorbitant terms — at last success — the expedition from pal.os — mutiny 

columbus's firmness — mistaken signs — land at last — a new world found — returns 
to spain — voyages and discoveries — humiliation his death at valladolid. 

CHAPTER II. 

POST-COLUMBIAN EXPLORERS AND DISCOVERERS, 49 

COLUMBUS AND HIS DISCOVERIES — I'HEIR EFFECT — OTHER NATIONS AROUSED — THE CABOTS AND 

LABRADOR — AMERICUS VESPUCIUS — I'HE NAME AMERICA— CANNIBALS AND THEIR SACRIFICES 

PINZON TURNS VOYAGER — HIS DISCOVER] F.S DA GAMA DE CABRAL BASTIDAS — DE LA COSA 

PONCE DE LEON HIS CAMPAIGN IN FLORIDA VERAZZANO HALLOA HE DISCOVERS THE 

PACIFIC DAVILA FERDINAND DE SOTO ATTEMPTS TO CONQUER FLORIDA A LONG MARCH 

ONWARD TO THE FAR WEST DE SOTO DISCOVERS THE MISSISSIPPI— DEATH AND BURIAL. 

CHAPTER III. 

SETTLING THE NEW COUNTRY 6o 



BEGINNINGS OF IMMIGRATION CONDITION OF EUROPE FIRST ATTEMPT AT COLONIZATION THE 

THIRTY YEARS' WAR FIRST ROANOKE COLONS WOMEN AND I HI. COLONISTS RALEIGH 

ASSIGNS HIS PATENT ACADIE THE VIRGINIA CHARTER LAZINESS AND ILL FEELING — OBTAIN- 
ING A NEW CHARTER THE POCAHONTAS MYTH— JOHN SMITH — HIS CHARACTER THE PLY- 
MOUTH COLONY A CRUEL WINTER MILES STANDISH PICTURESQUE CHARTERS — MASSACHU- 
SETTS BAY COLONY INDIAN WARS BOUNDARY DISPUTES — TOWN MEETINGS— HENDRICK HUD- 
SON NEW AMSTERDAM — PENN — THE FRIENDS RAPID SUCCESS OF I'HE QUAKERS. 

xi 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 
MAKING THE NEW PEOPLE, 



THE COLONISTS NEW CONDITION — LAND AND LABOR — THE RICE SWAMPS OF CAROLINA THE PLAN- 
TATION THE FARM — FORCING A STAPLE — A MULBERRY-TREE LAW — MANORIAL RIGHTS IN VIR- 
GINIA — HIE FEUDAL SYSTEM — THE ORIGIN OF THE VIRGINIA PARISH — THE COUNTY AND THE 

COURT — CASTE — THE AMERICAN BARON WHITE TRASH — EQUALITY IN NEW ENGLAND WHITE 

SLAVES — RELIGIOUS FREEDOM— CHARACTER OF THE PURITANS — EARLY HISTORIES OF MASSA- 
CHUSETTS — COTTON MATHER AND THE WITCHES NEW YORK'S AUTO DA FE SYMBOLISM 

THE QUAKER AND THE PURITAN — A PROTEST AGAINST PERSECUTION — THE FLUE LAWS THE 

HUDSON RIVER ESTATES SCHOOLS NORTH AND SOUTH — THE SPREAD OF INTELLIGENCE. 



CHAPTER V. 

OLD COLON Y DAYS AND WAYS 103 

HOME AND SOCIAL LIFE — ISOLATION OF COMMUNITIES THE TYPICAL PURITAN HOME — FRIENDLINESS 

AND REPRESSION HOME INDUSTRIES THE LOOM AND THE SPINNING WHEEL — HABITS OF THE 

PEOPLE — BOOKS AND READING — SCHOOL AND MEETING-HOUSE — MINISTER AND SQUIRE. 

CHAPTER VI. 

STORY OF THE BUCCANEERS AND PIRATES,. . . 117 

TORTUGA — THE FIRST HOME OF THE BUCCANEERS— SPAIN JEALOUS OF THE FRENCH — THE CAPTURE OF 

A WAR-SHIP — CHARACTER OV THE BUCCANEERS — PIERRE FRANCOIS AND THE PEARL FISHERS 

A CHANGE OF BASE — PORTUGUES — SUPPOSED DEATH OF THE PIRATE REJOICING OF THE SPAN- 
IARDS BRAZILIANO — THE PROFLIGACY OF PORT ROYAL — DAVIS'S STRATEGY DEFEAT AND VEN- 
GEANCE OF LOLONOIS — WEALTH OF THE SPANISH AMERICAN CITIES — THE DEFENSE OF MERIDA — ■ 

AN OLD SOLDIER OF FLANDERS THE LAST OF THE BUCCANEERS HENRY MORGAN HIS CAREER 

THE TAKING OF PUERTO BELLO — ST. CATHERINE'S FALLS MARACAIBO AGAIN — THE SPANISH 

ADMIRAL'S ULTIMATUM HOW MORGAN ANSWERED IT THEATRICAL CIVILITY MORGAN 

APPROACHES PANAMA — IN SIGHT OF PANAMA AN ARDUOUS BATTLE RICH BOOTY TREACHERY OF 

MORGAN — OTHER PIRATES — KIDD — BLACKBEARD — HOW KIDD GOT HIS COMMISSION, ETC. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE, 133 

RATIC INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES — CHARTERS AND ASSEMBLIES TOWN MEETINGS IN 

NEW ENGLAND — COUNTIES AS UNITS IN THE SOUTH — MASSACHUSETTS AND VIRGINIA REPRE- 
SENTATIVE TYPES— BACON'S REBELLION — ANDROS's TYRANNY — UNITY IN ACTION FOR SELF- 
DEFENSE — king, Philip's war, the dutch and the Spaniards, louisburgh, port royal— 

WASHINGTON AND BRADDOCK — OVERTHROW OF THE FRENCH POWER IN AMERICA THE ALBANY 

PLAN NAVIGATION LAWS THE STAMP ACT NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION — THE 

BOSTON MASSACRE — BOSTON 'TEA PARTY PORT BILL FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. xiii 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE "49 

CHARACTER OF THE WAR — THE BRITISH PLAN OF CAMPAIGN — BUNKER HILL — flCONDEROGA — THE 
DECLARATION' OF INDEPENDENCE — BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND — HARLEM HEIGHTS — WASHING- 
TON'S CROSSING THE DELAWARE — TRENTON AND PRINCETON — BURGOYNE'S EXPEDITION — 

SURRENDER OF BURGOYNE — HOWE AT PHILADELPHIA BATTLE OF GERMANTOWN — WASHINGTON 

AT VALLEY FORGE — THE FRENCH ALLIANCE MONMOUTH COURT HOUSE — INVASION OF GEORGIA 

AND SOUTH CAROLINA — GATES'S FAILURE — GREENE'S STRATEGY — BENEDICT ARNOLD'S TREACH- 
ERY — PALL JONES AND THE " SERAMIS " — AT YORKTOWN — WASHINGTON'S DECISIVE MOVE — 
SURRENDER OF CORNWALLIS — INDEPENDENCE ACKNOWLEDGED. 

CHAPTER IX. 

STRUGGLE EOR LIBERTY AND GOVERNMENT, . . 173 
BY FRANCIS NEWTON THORPE, PH.D., 



PROFESSOR OF SCHOOL OF AMERICAN HISTORY AND INSTITUTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 

COLONIZATION — SOME RESULTS — POPULAR RIGHTS — NEW ENGLAND — THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY — 
LIMITATIONS THE ENGLISH IDEA COLONIAL LEGISLATURES THE MONEY QUESTION GOVERN- 
ING OUTSIDE OF CHARTER LIMITATIONS TAXATION THOSE TEA CHESTS THE STRUGGLE FOR 

INDEPENDENCE CONFEDERATION — THE FRANCHISE — PROPERTY QUALIFICATION THAT STAR OF 

EMPIRE ITS WESTWARD COURSE THEN AND NOW, ETC. 



CHAPTER X. 

PATHFINDERS AND PIONEERS 199 

DANIEL BOONE A PICTURESQUE CHARACTER — WALKER — STEWART HOI. DEN MONCEY FINLEY 

COOL A FIRST VIEW OF KENTUCKY THE BIVOUAC A KENTUCKY FORT INDIAN CAPTURES 

DAVID CROCKETT A FASCINATING CAREER LEWIS AND CLARK THEIR WESTWARD TRAVELS 

FREMONT KIT CARSON ARCTIC EXPLORERS BEHRING VAN WRANGEL ROSS PARRY SIR 

JOHN FRANKLIN THE GRINNELL EXPEDITION — KANE — DR. HAYES SCHWALKER THE BENNETT 

EXPEDITION CAPTAIN LONG DEATH AND RESCUE. 



CHAPTER XI. 

PUSHING BACK THE BOUNDARIES 215 

ORIGINAL LINES ORDER OF ADMISSION OF THE STATES THE FRENCH CESSION THE SPANISH (I 5ION 

TEXAN ANNEXATION MEXICAN CESSION RUSSIAN PURCHASE THE ALEUTIAN ISLAND.-. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE SECOND WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, OR THE 

WAR OF 1S12, 231 

MEANING OF THE WAR— lis ( AUSES NEUTRAL RIGHTS — IMPRESSING AMERICAN SAILORS INSULTS 

AND OUTRAGES— THE -'CHESAPEAKE" AND THE " LEOPARD " INJURY TO AMERICAN COM- 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 

CKADES-THE ORDERS IN COUNCIL-EMBARGO VS RETALIATION-OUP NAVAL 

GLORY IN PHIS WAR-FAILURE OF PHE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CANADA-HULLS SURRENDER H 

„, rORIES AT SEA-THE "CONSTITUTION AND CHE " GUERRIERE -THE 

lM „ rH] .< FR ouc "—OTHER SEA-DUELS- AMERICAN PRIVATEERS-ON rHE LAKES- 

PERRY . S GR EAT VICTORY-LAND OPERATIONS-BATTLE OF CHE THAMES-WILKINSONS FIASCO 

_ THE "SHANNON 11 AND THE '« CHESAPEAKE "-ENGLISH REINFORCEMENTS-LUNDY S LAN. 

,„r BURNING 01 WASHINGTON-BALTIMORE SAVED-GENERA1 [ACKSON « 

NEW 0RU ,NS_THE rRl m OF PEACE-THE HARTFORD CONVENTION. 



I \..Y 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE STORY OK THE INDIAN 

OUR RELATIONS TO THE tNDIAN-PERIOD OF DISCOVERY-HOSPITALITY TO FIRS! 

OF HOSHTALITY-D^RUST AND WARFARE-COLONIAL PERIOD-EARU OUTBREAKS VND 
MASSACRES-FRENCH AND ENGLISH WARS-REVOLUTIONARY WAR-IND.AN STRUGGLE FOR 
1 1 RRITORY. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE INDIAN OE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. . . 261 
BY HON. HENRY L. DAWES, 

CHAIRMAN COMMITTBB ON INDIAN AFFAIRS, 1 5 5E 

VATIQNAJ PERT0D _C0NFLIC, BETWEEN TWO CIVILIZATIONS-INDIAN BUREAU -GOVERNMENT POLIO 
^EATmS-RESERVATIO, PLAN-REMOVALS UNDER IT-INDIAN WARS -PLAN O, CONCENTR 

TIO K-DSTURBANCE AND FIGHTING-PLAN 0> — ^" 

" ENT ^PRESENT CONDITION OF lN DIANS-NATURE VTION VND RESULTS-LAND .* 

SEVERALTY LAW-MISSIONARY EFFORT-NECESSITY VND Dim 0, 

CHAPTER XV. 

STORY OE THE NEGRO 277 

THE NEGRO IN AMERICA-THE FIRST CARGO-BEGINNING OF THE SLAVE CRAFFIC-AS A LABOR!. 

^CREASE .N NUMBERS-SLAVERY; ITS DIFFERED CHARACTER IN DIFFERED STATES 

Po ™ DISTURBANCES-AGITATION VND VGITATORS-JOHN BROWN-WAR VND HOW „ 
EMANCIPATED THE SLAVE— THE FREE NEGRO. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE STORY OE THE CIVIL WAR " 

, iION _ NO T EXCLUSIVELY X SOUTHERN .DEA-AN .RREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT-COMING EVENTS 
loLN-^A NATION .X .RMS-SUMTER-ANDERSON-McCLELLAN-V.CTORV AND DEFEAT- 

SlX A^d\eRR,MAC^^^^ 

CRANS _ PORTER -SHERMAN -SHERIDAN-LEE-GETTYSBURG V GREAT FIGM SHERMA 
mTrCH-THE CONFEDERATES WEAKENING-MORE VICTORIES-APPOMATTOX-LEE . SURRENDER- 
FROM WAR TO PEACE— ETC., 1 N 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. . xv 

CHAPTER XVII. 

SOME FORGOTTEN LESSONS OF THE WAR, . . 
BY ALEXANDER K. McCLURE, 



iRTH TO FIGH1 

'■! SIDE Mi TO COERCE — NAVAL i I IONIZED — 

GLOOMIEST PERrOD "I i ill WAR- THE ATLANTA— BATTLE 01 GETTYSBURG— LEE — 
ON — LINCOLN — GRANT, I 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

OUR FLAG AT SEA •. . . 359 

I,]-, 01 I in. A ■. I J . 1 ■ I < \'. NAVY — I' IH i • : " 

ID HAT I'HEY DID [NG THE BAR] [NG IM'AN — PORT 

iYAL — PASSING ['HI FORI imi "MONITOR" AND " MERRIMAC " — IN MOBILE PAY — THE 

" Kl * i I I\" — NAVAL ARCH ITONIZED — THE SAMOAN 
HURRICANE — BUILDING A NEW NAVY. 

LPTER XIX. 

DIFFICULTIES WITH FOREIGN POWERS, 361 

PERPETUAL PEACE IMPOSSIBLE — THE BARBARY STATES — BUYING PEACE — UNCLE SAM AROUSED — 
THRASHES THE ALGERINE PIRATES — A SPLENDID VICTORY — KING BOMBA BROUGHT TO TERMS — 
AUSTRIA AND THE KOSZTA CASE — CAPTAIN INGRAHAM — HIS BRAVERY — "DELIVER Ok i'i.I. -INK 

YOU" AUSTRIA YIELDS THE PARAGUAYAN TROUBLE — -LOPEZ COMES TO TERMS THE CHILIAN 

IMBROGLIO FiAI.MACEDA THE INSULT TO THE UNITED SPATES AMERICAN SEAMEN ATTACKED 

— MATTA'S IMPUDENT LETTER — BACKDOWN — PEACE — ALI.'s WELL THAT ENDS WELL, ETC. 

CHAPTER XX. 

ARCTIC ADVENTURERS 379 

THE FATE OF MR JOHN FRANKLIN — DR. KANE AND THE GRINNELL EXPEDITION — DR. HA'. I 
COVERS GRINNELL LAND — THE DEM II 01 CAPTAIN HALL — SCHWATKA'S SEARi 
RECORDS — THE JEANNETTE AND HER COMMANDER— DE LONG ON FLOATING IC1 
BENNETT ISLAND — WEYPRECHT'S GREAT PLAN AND THE I I EDI I Ion — LOCKWO 

ORTH. 

CHAPTER XXI. 

RELIGION UNDER NEW CONDITIONS 

THE old HEBREW COMMONWEALTH— WHEN LEADING SECTS ARRIVED — THEIR PRESENT NUMERICAL 
STRENGTH — CARDINAL FACT i REL1GIOI HI TORY IN THE I lTES— PHASE 
RELIGIOUS LIKE IN Nl i i\ MINISTER — HIS PREACHING — PURITAN MEET- 
ING HOUSE THE DUTCH " DOMINIE " — METHOD! R — GREAT P 

JONATHAN EDWARD-, THE ELDER— GEORGE Willi II I III > — '. iMONS — LYMAN BEECHER 

— HENRY WARD BEECHER — Ml RL] GRANDISON KINNEY — DENOMINATIONAL i ri< 

FRIENDS- BAPTIS1 I'HODISl CONGREGATIONALISTS — PRESBYTERIANS — ROMAN CATHOLU > 

— UNITARIANS — MORMON 1 ONI LUSION. 



xvi LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

THE PEOPLE UNDER NEW CONDITIONS 415 

THE NEW DEMOCRACY — MANHOOD SUFFRAGE — FEDERATION — THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICS AND 

PARTIES — THE FEDERALISTS HAMILTON DEMOCRATIC PARTY — JEFFERSON— WHIGS — HENRY 

CLAY WEBSTER — CALHOUN — ABOLITIONISTS — THE REPUBLICAN PARTY LINCOLN — INDEPEN- 
DENTS, ETC. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

GOLD AND SILVER MINING, 427 

OPENING THE WAY TO CALIFORNIA — DISCOVERY OF GOLD — MARSHAL AND SUTTER — PROFITS ONE 
DOLLAR PER MINUTE — SAN FRANCISCO WITH FIFTY HOUSES — FIVE TIMES DESTROYED BY FIRE 

DISCOVERY OF SILVER IN I S5 7 THE FATE OF EARLY MINERS — MINING LIFE VIGILANCE 

COMMITTEES, ETC. 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE RROBLEM ok our NATIONAL CURRENCY.. . 439 
BY HOiN. JOHN SHERMAN, 

ITS HISTORY AND EVOLUTION. By J. K. Upton. 

WHAT IS MONEY? ITS EARLY FORMS — ITS FUNCTIONS — LEGAL TENDER — CONSIDERED UNDER THREE 

FORMS — ITS HISTORY DIVIDED INTO THREE PERIODS — COLONIAL MONEY — DEBASING THE 

COINAGE — PAPER MONEY BI-METALISM — CONTINENTAL CURRENCY — MONEY UNDER THE 

CONSTITUTION HAMILTON ON BI-METALISM — REGULATION OF COINAGE — MINTS — PAPER MONEY 

OF THIS PERIOD — THE CRASH OF 1809— THE NATIONAL BANK — CRISIS OF l8l8 — THE PANIC OF 

1837 — ISSUE OF GREENBACKS BANK NOTES — RESUMPTION OF SPECIE PAYMENTS — GOLD AT I03 

— CONTRACTION OF THE CURRENCY — GREENBACKS AT PAR FOLLOWED BY UNPARALLELED 

PROSPERITY FUTURE CURRENCY OF THE COUNTRY. 

CHAPTER XXV. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY, 46* 

BY PROFESSOR T. S. DOOLITTLE, D.D., LL.D., 

VICE-PRESIDENT RUTGERS COLLEGE. 

EARLY TIMES — OUR DUTCH ANCESTORS — THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOOLS — "OLD VIRGINIA" — THE 
SCHOOL-MASTER — NEW YORK — THE FRIENDS— THE COMMON SCHOOL — SOME OLD TEXT-BOOKS — 

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN — SOME COLLEGES — EDUCATION SEES A REVIVAL MANUAL 

TRAINING SCHOOLS WOMEN IN COLLEGE THE OLD-TIME ACADEMY AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES 

— THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES — THE CHAUTAUQUA IDEA— UNIVERSITY EXTENSION — THE OUTLOOK, 
ETC., ETC. 

CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE FARMER AND HIS FARM, 477 

THE HOMESTEAD SYSTEM — IMPORTANCE OF THE AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRIES — THE GREAT GRAIN 

HARVESTS TRUCK-FARMING NURSERIES FLORICULTURE SEED-FARMS FRUIT CULTURE — 

ORANGES, BANANAS, AND GRAPES — THE NEGLECTED FARMS OF NEW ENGLAND AND THE GREAT 
PLANTATIONS OF THE WEST — THE COTTON FIELDS OF THE SOUTH. 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. xvii 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

SOME GREAT AMERICAN INDUSTRIES ^95 

IN THE ROCK-RIBBED HILLS — BURIED TREASURES OF EARTH RARE STONES — VARIEGATED MARBLES 

GRANITES — HOW TO GET THE STONES OUT— A YOUNG INDUSTRY — THE GREAT FLOUR MILLS 

— OLD-TIME MILLING THE NEW PROCESS — THE GREAT FLOUR MILLS OF THE WEST — THEIR 

VAST OUTPUTS, ETC. — THE GREAT OIL WELLS — A WONDERFUL INDUSTRY — MORE LIGHT 

PETROLEUM ITS HISTORY — DEVELOPMENT — GAS WELLS — THE GREAT PIPE LINES " GUSHERS " 

— SUGGESTIVE FIGURES, ETC. 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

GREAT INVENTIONS AND THEIR INVENTORS, . . 5°5 

PROPERTY RIGHTS — INVENTION AND AGRICULTURE: THE SCYTHE — CRADLE — PLOW — COTTON-GIN — 

THRESHING MACHINES MOWERS AND REAPERS MACHINERY AND FOOD SUPPLY— INVENTIONS 

AND MANUFACTURES : EARLY INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS — OLIVER EVANS — GRIST MILLING — 

THE STEAM ENGINE — NAIL MACHINES — THE LATHE — LOOM AND SPINDLE WOODWORTH PLANER 

—VULCANIZED RUBBER — ELECTRIC POWER AND LIGHT INVENTION — THE DOMESTIC LIFE: 
MODERN HOUSES — THE IRON STORE — LAMPS — MATCHES — SEWING MACHINES — CLOCKS — WATCHES 

— ELECTRIC TIME SERVICE — THE VALUE OF A SECOND OTHER INVENTIONS, ETC.. ETC. 

CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE SAVING OR LIRE 525 

ORGANIZED AND SYSTEMATIC ACTION FOR THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE — LIGHT HOUSE SYSTEM— 

THE THEORY OF COAST LIGHTING EXPENDITURE OF MONEY AND LABOR APPALLING — UNITED 

STATES LIFE-SAVING SERVICE — OPENING OF THE "ACTIVE SEASON — HOUSEKEEPING ARRANGE- 
MENTS LIMITS ESTABLISHED FOR PURPOSES OF WATCH AND PATROL — NIGHT DIVIDED INTO 

FOUR WATCHES— PORTION OF DUTIES — APPLIANCES — BOATS — PROCESS OF RESCUE DESCRIBED — 
EVERY COMFORT PROVIDED FOR THE SHIPWRECKED PEOPLE — RESUSCITATION — FOUNDER OF THE 

SYSTEM — REGULATION FOR THE PREVENTION OF COLLISIONS AT SEA — BOARDS OF HEALTH 

THE AMBULANCE SYSTEM — INCREASED SAFETY OF TRAVEL BY SEA AND LAND. 

CHAPTER XXX. 

FROM CAVE TO PALACE 547 

CAVE-DWELLERS — HOUSES OF THE CANONS — INTERIOR IMPROVEMENTS — CLIFF DWELLERS — THE MUMMY 
CAVE OF THE CANON DEL MUERTO, ARIZONA — THE PUEBLOS — GOLDEN CITIES — THE NOMAD AND 
HIS TENT — THE SOD HOUSE THE LOG CABIN — THE COLONIAL HOUSE — GAMBREL ROOFS — TYP- 
ICAL MANOR HOUSES THE SOUTHERN PLANTER'S MANSION — A DRY TIME IN ART — EXPENSIVE 

CAMPS THE COUNTRY HOUSE — THE CITY HOUSE — INDIVIDUALITY — CONTRASTS — THE NEW AND 

THE OLD ETC. 

CHAPTER XXXI. 

TRAPPING AND HUNTING, 561 

EXPLORERS AND TRAPPERS — THE COURIERS DES BOIS — THE FUR INDUSTRY — BEARS AND BEAR 
HUNTING — NOTED HUNTERS — DEER AND DEER HUNTING — THE ELK OR MOOSE — THE STAG OR 
WAPITI — ANTELOPE — OUR GAME BIRDS. 



xviii LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

HUNTING AND FISHING, . . '. ? 575 

EARLY AMERICAN FISHERIES — INDIANS AS FISHERMEN — THE SURE SPEARHOOK — FISH EVERYWHERE 

THE COD FISHERIES — .MIGRATORY HABITS — MACKEREL MENHADEN — HERRING — TARPON 

BLUE-FISH — SALMON — [ROUT AND TROUT FISHING. 

CHAPTER XXXIII. 

OUR AMERICAN LITERATURE 5»5 

COLONIAL LITERATURE — POST-REVOLUTION LITERATURE — -IRVING — CULPRIT FAY — MARCO BOZZARIS — 

BRYANT — RECENT LITERATURE — WALT WHITMAN HOWELLS — HENRY JAMES — F. MARION 

i RAWFORD — NEW ENGLAND LITERATURE — WHITT1ER — LOWELL — LONGFELLOW — HAWTHORNE 

MINOR NOVELISTS — THE LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH AND WEST — AMERICAN HISTORIANS 

AMERICAN ORATORY — WEBSTER WENDELL PHILLIPS — CONTRAST BETWEEN ENGLISH AND 

AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALISM! 60 1 

THE FIRST PRINTED SHEETS — NEWSPAPERS IN THE TIMES OF THE PILGRIMS — EARLY AMERICAN 
JOURNALS — FRANKLIN AND HIS WORK — THE FIRST LIBEL SUIT— RAPID MULTIPLICATION OF THE 

NEWSPAPER PRESS — MAGNITUDE AND INFLUENCE OF THE INSTITUTION AT THE PRESENT TIME 

IMPROVEMENT IN PRESSES AND TYPE SETTING — HOW A GREAT PAPER OF THE PRESENT DAY IS 
MANUFACTURED — TWO GREAT EDITORS — COMPETITION IN NEWS-GATHERING — THE ILLUSTRATED 
PRESS — THE RELIGIOUS AND LITERARY PRESS — THE MISSION OF THE NEWSPAPER. 

CHAPTER XXXV. 

HOW WE GOVERN OURSELVES 613 

THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT — CONGRESS — HOW COMPOSED — DUTIES — EXECUTIVE — ELECTION OF 

PRESIDENT — CABINET — JUDICIARY — POWERS OF SUPREME COURT FEDERAL SYSTEM — RELATION 

OF STATES TO NATION — THE RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES. 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

OUR PRESIDENTS 625 

THE TWENTY-THREE STATESMEN WHO HAVE OCCUPIED THE PRESIDENTIAL CHAIR— BRIEF SKETCHES 
OF THEIR LIVES — THF MEMORABLE EVENTS OF TflEIR ADMINISTRATIONS — THE IMPORTANT FACTS 
OF OUR POLITICAL, COMMERCIAL, AND SOCIAL HISTORY SINCE THE ADOPTION OF THE CON- 
1ION. 

CHAPTER XXXVII. 

TRAVEL IN OLD TIMES AND NEW 653 

OLD-TIME TRAVEL — THE STAGE — THE TURNPIKE OLD INNS — COUNTRY PLACES — THEIR ISOLATED 

SITUATION — THE POST RIDER — THE STORY OF JACOB THE ROWER — A SPECIAL DELIVERY QUEER 

FERRIES EARLY RIVER TRAVEL — STEAMBOAT VERSUS SCHOONER THE MISSISSIPPI FLATBOATS— 

OVER THE SAGEBRUSH "THE PRAIRIE SCHOONER" — TRAVEL IN THE ROCKIES CLIPPER SHIPS 

OCEAN TRAVEL. 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

MAXUFACTURING AND MILLING, 



THE COLONIAL PERIOD: THE STRUGGLE — PRIMITIVE CONDITIONS — SUM' BUILDING — SAW .MILLS — 
LUMBER — GRIST MILLS — FLOUR TEXTILES — FORBIDDEN MAN1 FACTURES — THE FORMATIVE 
PERIOD: THE REVOL1 HONARY WAR AND INVENTION — HOUSEHOLD INDUSTRIES — THE INDUS- 
TRIAL INVASION — SLAVERY — FORTY YEARS AGO — INDUSTRIAL CONTESTS — TRIUMPHANT INDUS- 
TRY; THE CIVIL WAR PHENOMENAL PROGRESS — INDUSTRY EMANCIPATED THE LAST DECADE 

THE NEW SOUTH — ON TO SUPREMACY. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 

OUR AMERICAN RAILROADS, 681 

THE FIRST LOCOMOTIVE EARLY RAILWAYS — TRIAL TRIPS — THE MOHAWK AND SCHENECTADY ROAD 

A TRIAL TRIP — IMPROVEMENTS A RAILWAY MANIA OLD-TIME COACHES ACROSS THE 

CONTINENT — PARLOR AND SLEEPING CARS — CONS ATION — THE GREAT RAILWAY COMPANIES 

HOI l ENGINE THE NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILWAY THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM 

BRIDGES— THE ELECTRIC RAILWAY THE OUTLOOK. ETC. 

CHAPTER XL. 

LIRE ON THE FRONTIER 695 

THE SOUATTER AND II1S TRAIN THE SETTLER AND HIS HOMESTEAD — CATTLE RANGES AND THE 

COWBOYS — SCENES ON THE GREAT PLAINS — A CATTLE FUNERAL — THE WOMEN OF THE RANCH. 



CHAPTER XLI. 

WORLD'S RAIRS 7'« 

NATIONAL EXHIBITIONS IN EARLY YEARS THE FIRST FAIRS IN FRANCE PRINCE ALBERT AND THE 

FIRST UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION — THE NEW YORK CRYSTAL PALACE OF 1853 OBJECTS OF INTEREST 

IN THOSE DAYS — THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION OF IS76 A TRULY UNIVERSAL DISPLAY MAR- 
VELOUS DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE, ART AND INDUSTRY — THE COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION OF 1 893 
ITS SITUATION AND SCOPE — THE OBJECT AND INFLUENCE OF WORLD'S FAIRS. 



CHAPTER XLII. 

THE METROPOLITAN CITY, 725 

MONEY MAKING AND MONEY SPENDING — EXPANSION — COMMERCE NEW AMSTERDAM BECOMES NEW 

YORK THE BRITISH NOT -SELF-GOVERNMENT V.V T INDIVIDUAL SELF-HELP POLITE TO THE 

INDIANS ARISTOCRATIC COSMOPOLITAN — POLICY OF EXPEDIENCY MORALS — LIBERTY OF ( 0N- 

SCIENCE AND OF OPINION SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE AROUSED GROWING PROSPERITY PIRACY 

NEW YORK IN 1750 A GARDEN — SIX CLASSES OF SOCIETY — SPIRIT OF REVOLUTION IN THE AIR 

1665-I783 1783 tO 1825 ASTOR VANDERBILT A. T. STEWART FLASHY IMITATION OF 

PARIS POPULATION FLOWING IN BUSINESS MORALS MUSIC, ART AND LITERATURE— GREAT 

BUILDINGS — EVERY MAN His OWN MASTER IN NEW YORK. 



xx LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 

CHAPTER XLIII. 

THE NEW ENGLAND CAPITAL, .• "43 

EIRTH OF THE CITY — HARDSHIPS — THANKSGIVING DAY — LIFE AND CHARACTER OF THE OLD SETTLERS 

— COMMERCE PIRATES HUNG — WEALTH AND LUXURY — BOSTON AND THE REVOLUTION — VAST 

DEPOPULATION — STAGNATION IN BUSINESS — SOCIAL LIFE — PUNISHMENT OF CRIMINALS — GROWTH 

AFTER THE WAR — DISTINCTIVE FEATURES — THE BOSTON COMMON THE PUBLIC GARDEN — TRINITY 

SQUARE — NEW OLD SOUTH CHURCH— THE CHURCH OF PHILLIPS BROOKS — THE STREET OF HORSE 
CARS — SHOPPING STREET — BOSTON FIRE OF 1S72 — GREAT EDUCATIONAL CENTRE — HARVARD 
COLLEGE — KINDERGARTEN SCHOOLS — OTHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS — BOSTON CHARACTERIZED 
— LOVE OF LIBERTY AND INDEPENDENCE. 

CHAPTER XLIV. 

THE CITY OE AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE 759 

PHILADELPHIA — EARLY SETTLEMENT — SCOTCH, IRISH AND OTHER SETTLERS — WILLIAM PENN AND THE 

INDIANS CHARTER AND LAWS OF PENNSYLVANIA THE PENAL CODE OF PENN — REFORMATORY 

AND PHILANTHROPIC INSTITUTIONS — A MEDICAL CENTRE PHILADELPHIA IN THE REVOLUTION — 

THE CITY OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION— INDEPENDENCE HALL COMMERCE AND MANU- 
FACTURES A CITY OF HOMES — CLUBS AND SOCIETIES — THE SCHOOL AND THE PRINTING PRESS 

— SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 

CHAPTER XLV. 

THE CITY OE THE WORLD'S FAIR, 775 

THE FIRST CIVILIZED VISITORS — THE EARLIEST SETTLERS — VICISSITUDES OF THE YOUNG TOWN RAPID 

GROWTH OF THE CITY — THE GREAT FIRE — THE PRESENT SIZE AND WEALTH OF CHICAGO — ITS 
PLEASURE GROUNDS AND PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDINGS — THE COSMOPOLITAN INHABITANTS 
OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY. 

CHAPTER XLVI. 

THE NORTHWEST 789 

BY ALBERT SHAW, LL. D., 

EDITOR OP REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 

A SHIFTING, UNCERTAIN DESIGNATION — A GREAT ARABLE WEDGE — PRAIRIES PEOPLED AS IF BY 
MAGIC — RAILROADS THE PIONEERS AND COLONIZERS — THE BLEAK, SCORCHING PRAIRIES AND 
"CLAIM SHANTIES" OF 1S70 — TRANSFORMED INTO A GARDEN-LIKE LANDSCAPE — THE DAIRY 
AND LIVE-STOCK FARMS OF TO-DAY, WITH THEIR FRAGRANT MEADOWS AND AMPLE GROVES — 
THE RAPID DESTRUCTION OF THE VAST WHITE-PINE FORESTS — ITS RESULTING DEVELOPMENT 
OF THE COUNTRY — THE HARDSHIPS THAT PRECEDED IRON RAILS IN THE TREELESS REGION — 
THE SCHOOLHOUSE OF TURF— THE INDUSTRIAL LIFE BASED SOLIDLY UPON AGRICULTURE — 
WHO IS THE WESTERN FARMER? — CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE TRANSPORTATION CORPORATIONS 
AND THE FARMERS DEVELOPING THE PRINCIPLE OF PUBLIC REGULATION OF RATES — OTHER 

INDUSTRIES THE "TWIN CITIES " THE CAPITAL THE NORTHWESTERN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM 

— RADICALISM AND THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT THE SPIRIT OF ACTION INTENSE — THE 

RACE PROBLEMS — THE LARGE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT OF POPULATION PROGRESS OF THE 

NORTHWESTERN SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE. 



PACE 



LIST OF CHAPTERS AND SUBJECTS. 
CHAPTER XLVII. 

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW Soj 

BY HON. W. C. P. BRECKINRIDGE, 

WHAT IS "THE SOUTH?" — EARLY SETTLEMENT — SLAVERY AND AGRICULTURE — THE FARMING STATE-. 
THE PLANTING STATES — LIFE OF THE PLANTER — LACK OF CO-OPERATIVE EFFORT — THE DOMESTIC- 
LIFE — POSITION OF THE MISTRESS — SOUTHERN LADIES — YOUNG MEN — LEARNED PROFESSIONS — 

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT — THREE DISTINCT SOUTHS CHANGES CAUSED BY THE WAR — RACE 

QUESTION — DEVELOPMENT OF NEW INDUSTRIES — BREAKING UP OF THE SOLID SOUTH — ETC., ETC. 



CHAPTER XLVIII. 

WOMEN IN AMERICA, 
BY MISS FRANCES E. WILLARD, 



TWO DISTINCT EARLY TYPES — THE NORTHERN AND THE SOUTHERN — NO PLACE FOR GIRLS IN THE 
NEW ENGLAND PUBLIC SCHOOLS — NO EDUCATION FOR WOMEN IN COLONIAL PERIOD — GIRLS FIRST 
ADMITTED TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS JUST IOO YEARS AGO— CHURCH AND SCHOOLS — ADMISSION TO 
HIGH SCHOOLS — UNIVERSITIES — WOMEN AS TEACHERS — SOUTHERN WOMEN — SELF SUPPORT — FIELDS 

NOW OPEN TO THEM — IN LITERATURE — IN THE PROFESSIONS IN REFORM MOVEMENTS — THE 

SPHERE OF WOMEN — ETC. , ETC. 

CHAPTER XLIX. 

THE AMERICAN CHURCH 827 

BY BISHOP J. H. VINCENT, LL.D., 

CHANCELLOR OF THE CHAUTAUQUA UNIVFRSITY 

SURVEY OF THE CLOSING CENTURY — WHAT IS THE AMERICAN CHURCH? — THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF 
FREEDOM — RACE DIFFICULTIES TO CONTEND WITH— CULTIVATION AND WORSHIP — NOT A STATE 

CHURCH — GOD IN ALL HISTORY — METHODISM IN ALL CHURCHES UNITY OF FAITH AND EFFORT 

— MODIFICATION OF CREEDS — PROPOSED UNITED CHURCH IN SMALL TOWNS — ROMAN CATHOLIC 
MOVEMENT — NO CREED BUT REPUBLICANISM — CHAUTAUQUA MOVEMENT. 

CHAPTER L. 

THE OUTLOOK 841 

BY HAMILTON W. MAB1E. 

PERILS AND OPPORTUNITIES — A FREE FIELD FOR WORKING OUT THE HUMAN PROBLEM — SOCIAL 
AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA. 











i nun 11 III 
DECORATION DAY. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Washington Taking Oath. Frontispiece. 
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, .... 

Model of U. S. Man-of-war, 

Lincoln and His Son "Tad," xxv 

I.evici, in the Bay of Genoa, 

On the Coast of Nova Scotia 

Christopher Columbus, 

Monument to Columbus at Genoa 

Columbus at the Convent of La Rabida, . . 

Columbus and the Messenger, 

Caravels of Christopher Columbus, .... 
The Eclipse of the Sun as Predicted by 

Columbus, 

Surrender of Grenada, 

Columbus's First Sight of Land 

Haytian Indian Girl Spinning, 

Columbus in Irons, 

Cabot on the Shores of Labrador 

An Itian Cannibal Chief ( IfferingaHuman 

Sacrifice to the Sun, 

Vasco Da Gama 

Ferdinand Cortez 

Balboa Discovers the Pacific, 

Balboa takes Possession of the Pacific in 

the Name of His Sovereigns, 

Burial of De Soto, 

The Banks of the Mississippi To-day, . . . 
Old Gates of St. Augustine, Florida, . . . 

An Indian Attack on Brookfield, 

Indian Village Enclosed With Palisades, 

An Indian Council of War, 

Bacon Demanding His Commission of 

Governor Berkeley, 

Burning of Jamestown 

Armor Worn by the Pilgrims in 1620, . . . 
Standish Holds a Council with the Indians. . 



PAGE 

A Pioneer Fleeing from Enraged Pequots, . S3 

A Pequot Massacre, 84 

Penn's Treaty with the Indians 87 

A New England Weaver, 89 

Fairfax Court House, 01 

An Old Time Colonial House 92 

Old Spanish House. New Orleans, .... 94 

An Old Virginia Mansion, 95 

The James River and Country Near Ri< 1. 

mond, Virginia, 96 

A Dutch Household 98 

Rioters at Springfield . Mass., in 1 786, . . 101 

Am ient Horseshoes 103 

Colonial Plow with Wooden Mold-board, . 104 

Ancient Hand-made Spade 104 

Irish Immigrant's Flax Wheel 105 

A Colonial Flax Wheel 105 

A Comporter or (hating Dish 106 

Dutch House in Albany, New York, . . . 106 
Primitive Mode of Grinding Corn, .... 107 

Old French House, 10X 

Silk Winding 109 

Niagara and the Beaver Dams in 

Fro/en Niagara, 112 

Champlain's Fortified Camp, Quebec, . . .114 
Colonial Mansion, Charleston, S. C, . . . 115 

Bartholomew de Portugues 120 

Francois Solonois, 1^3 

Morgan Recruiting for an Attack on 

Puerto Bello, 127 

Blackbeard the Pirate 12S 

Digging for Kidd's Treasures 129 

Captain Bartholomew Roberts 131 

Signing the Declaration of Independence, . 137 
Martello Tower on the Plains of Abraham, 

where Wolfe was Killed 139 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Death of Wolfe 141 

Old Building in Boston where the Tea 

Plot was Hatched, 14- 

Pursuit of Paul Revere, the Stout 146 

Meeting of Washington and Rochambeau, . 148 

Cornwallis, 150 

Washington's Reception at Trenton, . . . 151 

" Give them Watts, Boys ! " 153 

Washington Crossing the Delaware, .... 156 

Surrender of Burgoyne, 158 

Washington Reproving Lee at Monmouth, . 162 

Negro Village in Georgia, 163 

Tarleton's Lieutenant and the Farmer, . .165 

Escape of Benedict Arnold, 167 

View of Capitol, Washington 172 

Francis Newton Thorpe, 173 

Benjamin Franklin, 175 

The Liberty Bell, as Exhibited at the New 

Orleans Exhibition, 176 

Alexander Hamilton 179 

Rear View of Independence Hall 180 

Henry Clay, 183 

Daniel Webster, 1S7 

John C. Calhoun, 191 

The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, 193 
A Palm Grove in Southern California. . . 197 
Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Na- 
tional Park, 198 

A Musk Ox Hunt, 200 

Daniel Boone in "Hunters' Paradise," . . 201 
Death of John Steuart, Boone's Companion, 203 
Exploring the Echo River. Mammoth Cave, 207 
The Far West — Yellowstone National Park, 209 
Fremont, Addressing the Indians, . . . . 21 t 
Geyser, Yellowstone National Park,. . . . 212 

Shawanoh, the Ute Chief 213 

Volcanic Reefs of Arizona, 214 

Grande Avenue, 216 

Seal Catching in Alaska 219 

Eagle Gate of Brigham Young's School, . . 221 

Great Salt Lake City, 223 

The Founders of Los Angeles, 225 

Idols Totem, of Alaska 226 

Giant Tree, Yosemite Valley, California, . . 228 

The Benches of the Fraser River 229 

View of a Cotton-Chute 233 

Loading a Cotton Steamer 235 

Burning of Washington, 237 



Statue of Commodore Perry, 239 

View on Lake Ontario, 241 

Weathersford and General Jackson, .... 243 

A Planter's House in Georgia, 246 

A Cheyenne, 247 

Old Mission Indian of Southern California, 248 

Tomo-chi-chi and His Nephew, 250 

An Old Indian Farm-House, 251 

Courtship among the Indians, 252 

Burying Sacred Plume-sticks in the Ocean,. 253 
The Indian's Declaration of War, .... 255 
Perm's Residence in Second Street, . . . .257 
The Apache Chiefs, Geronimo, Natchez, . . 258 

Hon. Henry L. Dawes 261 

Pedro Pino. Lai-iu-ah-tsai-la 263 

Kon-it'l, an Indian Chief, 264 

Custer's Last Fight 267 

Unhorsed — An Incident of Custer's Fight, . 269 

Indian Agency, 270 

Attack by Modocs on Peace Commissioners, 271 

General George Crook, 273 

General Crook's Apache Guide 275 

Introduction of Slavery, 279 

Executing Negroes in New York, 281 

V Cotton Field in Georgia 285 

A Xegro A'illage in Alabama, 287 

Early Home of Abraham Lincoln 289 

Statue of Washington in Richmond, . . . 292 

A Skirmisher 293 

John Brown after his Capture 295 

The Arts of Peace and the Art of War. . . 296 

Fort Moultrie, Charleston, 298 

Battle of Pittsburg Landing, 299 

Antietam Bridge, 301 

liattle of Chancellorsville 303 

General Robert Edmund Lee, 305 

Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, 307 

Retreat of Lee's Army 309 

Entrance to Gettysburg Cemetery, . . . . ;,n 
Longstreet Reporting at Bragg's Head- 
quarters, 313 

Lincoln's Grave 316 

Colonel A. K. McClure 317 

The Swamp Angel Battery 318 

General Sheridan at Cedar Creek, . . . .319 

Death of General Polk 321 

Surrender of General Lee, 323 

Fight between the Monitor and Merrimac, . 325 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



M isl Weather at the Front, 327 

Death of Maximilian 329 

North End of Andersonville Prison, . . . 331 

Libby Prison in 1865 332 

Libby Prison in 1884 ^t, 

( lapture of Booth, 335 

Win. T. Sherman, 337 

Paul Jones 341 

Going to the Rescue 345 

Sinking of the "Alabama," 348 

The '■ Destroyer" Torpedo Vessel 351 

Burnside's Expedition Crossing Hatteras 

Bar, 35s 

•• Chicago," U. S. N., A New Warship, . . 358 

Funeral Train of General Grant 360 

A Railroad Battery 363 

I nited Mates Military Telegraph Wagon, . 305 

The Port of Colon. . 367 

Latest Model of Gatling Field Gun, . . .360 

Eight-inch Gun and Carriage, 371 

A Ten-inch Breech-loading Rifle, .... 373 
A Twelve-inch Breech-loading Mortar, . . 375 

Harper's Ferry, 377 

Review of Union Armies at Washington, . 378 
Franklin and the "Erebus" and "Terror," 381 

Kane and His Companions 382 

Crewof "Jeannette" Leaving in Boats, . . 3S3 
Farthest North Reached by Lockwood, . .385 

\ I uneral in the Arctic Regions 387 

Places of Worship in New York in 1742, . 389 
Bible Brought Over in the " Mayflower," . 390 
Church Spires of New York in 1746, . . .392 

Some Boston Spires. 1758, 395 

First Friends' Meeting House, 397 

Colonial Monastery, Ephrata, Pa 399 

St. Patrick's Cathedral 401 

Moravian Easter Service, 404 

Old Dutch Church, New Utrecht, L. I., . 406 
Execution of Rev. Stephen Burroughs, . . 408 

Recantation of Judge Sewall, 410 

Passover Supper, as observed by Jews, . .414 
Opening Up a New Cattle Country, . . .417 

Duel Between Burr and Hamilton 410 

Execution of Hetherington and Brace. . .421 

A Labor Strike 423 

Arbitration, 425 

Clearing Up Under Currents 428 

The Sluice 430 



PAGE 

The Cradle, 432 

Gold Washing in California 434 

At Work in the Silver Mines 436 

Washington's Grave, 438 

Hon. John Sherman, 439 

United States Mint, New Orleans 443 

New York Stock Exchange, 447 

A Raid on a Bank, 453 

Henry W. Longfellow, .■ . . . 460 

Professor T. S. Doolittle, D. D., LL. D., . 461 
Interior of the Memorial Hall, Harvard, . . 463 

Memorial Hall, Harvard College 465 

Dome and Telescope, Lick Observatory, Cal. 467 

Vale College Chapel, 469 

College Football, a Touch-down 47r 

The Library, Vassar (inside) 473 

The Drexel Institute, Philadelphia 475 

A Plantation Gateway 47 7 

Bagging Wool for Transportation 479 

Entrance to a Cotton Yard, 481 

The " Picayune Tier," 4-84 

A Bee Ranch in Lower California, .... 4S6 
Valley Irrigation in Southern California, . 488 

Wind-Break of Eucalyptus Trees, 49 1 

In the Quarry, 49 6 

Sluice-Gate. 497 

Between the Mills 498 

Barrel-Hoist and Tunnel, 49 s 

Shooting a Well, 499 

Guarding a Wild-Cat Well, 500 

( ras Wells 5 01 

Transporting Oil, 5°3 

Speedwell Iron Works. New Jersey 507 

Shop in Which the First Morse Instrument 

Was Constructed, 510 

Manner of Connecting Aeroplanes, . . . .515 
Suspension Bridge, Niagara Falls, . . . .524 

A Light Ship, 5 26 

The Night Patrol 5- 8 

Burning a Signal 53° 

Drill and Exercise in the Surf Boat, . . . 532 

Off to a Wreck, 534 

Launching the Surf Boat 536 

Tally Board and Whip Block 538 

The Breeches Buoy, 54° 

Breeches Buoy in Operation, 542 

The Self-Righting Life Boat, 544 

Face of the American Fall in Winter, . . 545 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Old Spanish House in New York, .... 548 

The Marigny House, New Orleans 550 

An Old New York Mansion, 552 

Interior of the Cary House, Va., 553 

Denver in 1878, 555 

An Old Maryland Manor House, 557 

Ancient Block House, Alaska 559 

"Theire Sitting at Meate," 561 

Cross-Country Riding in America 563 

A Goat Brought to Bay, 565 

Mrs. Bob White and Family, 568 

Landing an Alligator, 570 

Ayan Grave, Alaska, 573 

New Settlement in the Northwest, .... 574 

" The Broyling of Their Fish," 575 

"Broke Away," 577 

Tarpon-Angling, 5S0 

Hawthorne's Birthplace, 586 

••The Old Manse," Concord, 1883, . . .588 

Whittier, 590 

Walt Whitman 592 

Lowell, 594 

Louisa May Alcott 596 

Whittier's Birthplace 598 

A Primitive Printing Press, 603 

Patent Single Small Cylinder Press 607 

The Bullock-Hoe Perfecting Press 609 

Jas. Cr. Blaine, Ex-Secretary of State, . . . 615 

Senate Chamber, 617 

House of Representatives 61S 

The White House — Main Entrance. . . .619 

Smithsonian Institute 621 

Garfield's Struggle with Death, 624 

George Washington 626 

John Adams, 628 

Thomas Jefferson, 629 

James Madison, 630 

James Monroe, 631 

John Quincy Adams 632 

Andrew Jackson 633 

Martin Van Buren, 634 

William Henry Harrison 635 

John Tyler, 636 

James Knox Polk 637 

Zachary Taylor, 638 

Millard Fillmore, 639 

Franklin Pierce 640 

James Buchanan 641 



Abraham Lincoln (143 

Andrew Johnson, 644 

Ulysses Simpson Grant, 645 

Rutherford Burchard Hayes 646 

James Abram Garfield, 647 

Chester Alan Arthur 648 

Stephen Grover Cleveland, 649 

Benjamin Harrison, 6so 

Decoration Day, xxii 

Turnpike in Kentucky, 654 

A Chaise of the 18th Century, 656 

American Stage-Coach of 1795, 658 

Sleeping- and Dining-Car Interior 660 

Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel C61 

Opening of the Erie Canal 663 

" Johnny Bull," or No. 1, 665 

Arrival of the "Great Eastern," 667 

New Terminal Station, Reading K. R., . . 683 
On the Baltimore and Ohio R. R., . . . . 685 

The Loop, Above Georgetown. Col 687 

Entering Boulder Canon. Col 689 

Mossbrae 691 

John M. Toucey 692 

Mother and Infant 695 

A Tumble From the Trail 697 

A Bucking Broncho, 700 

A Dispute Over a Brand, 703 

An Indian Warrior, 705 

Plan of the World's Fair Grounds 710 

Main Building of the Centennial 711 

Machinery Building, World's Fair, . . . .713 

Horticultural Building, 714 

Agricultural Building, 715 

Woman's Building, 717 

Art Palace, 718 

Mines and Mining Building, 719 

Transportation Building, 721 

U. S. Government Building, 722 

Horticultural Hall, New Orleans, . . . .724 

The New York City Hall, 727 

St. Paul's Church, New York 728 

Store at 55 Broadway, New York. .... 730 
Produce Exchange Building, New York, . .731 

The Obelisk in Central Park 733 

Greenwood Cemetery, 734 

The Brooklyn Bridge, 736 

Elevated Railroad, 738 

Boat-House and Float 740 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



The Monument on Bunker Hill, 745 

Old South Church, Boston, 748 

Faneuil Hall, Boston, 751 

Stoics in Bedford Street, Boston, 754 

Scene on Broadway, New York, 758 

William Penn, 760 

An Old Colonial House 7G1 

Independence Hall, Philadelphia, .... 763 

Cathedral, Philadelphia, 765 

Franklin's Grave, 766 

Bears' Pit, Zoological Gardens, 767 

Memorial Hall of 1S76 768 

Where the Type and Plates for this Book 

were made, 769 

Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, . . . 771 

Pennsylvania Railroad Station, 773 

A Chicago Mansion in 1S12, 776 

Illinois and Michigan Canal, 778 

Burning of Chicago in 1873 7^° 

Lake Shore Drive, 782 

Side View of City Hall, 784 

The Auditorium Building, Chicago, . . . 785 
Boat in Chicago River, 786 



Horticultural Hall, 787 

Albert Shaw, ll.d., 7S9 

The Royal Gorge, Colorado 793 

View of Indian Life in Alaska, 797 

1'aNs in the Mountains, 799 

Falls of St. Anthony, 18S5, 801 

Hon. W. C. P. Breckinridge, S03 

Corn Shucking in Georgia, 806 

Monument of Henry W. Grady, S09 

Earthquake at Charleston, S. C, 811 

Statue of Benjamin Harvey Hill S13 

Frances E. Willard, 817 

William Cullen Bryant 825 

Salt Lake City, 826 

The Elms, Vale University, S30 

Mountains of the Holy Cross, Colorado, . . S35 

Bailey's Dam on the Red River, S39 

View of the Great Canons, Arizona, . . . 840 

First Train of Cars in America 841 

An Old Woolen Mill, 843 

Views in the Yosemite Valley, California, . 845 
View of the Golden Gate, California, . . . S48 
Warehouse of Marshall Field, Chicago, . .851 




I. Mi 



LINCOLN AND HIS SON "TAD." 



THE MEMORIAL 



STORY OF AMERICA 



1492 TO 1892. 




I.F.VICI, IN Tilt. BAY OF GENOA. 



CHAPTER I. 



FINDING THE NEW COUNTRY. 




HILE Discovery, whether disclosing unknown lands beyond 
untried seas, or revealing the method of subduing and 
utilizing to man's service some one of the mighty forces of 
Nature, has startled the world more than Conquest, scarcely 
less surprising than some discoveries is the fact that the 
world has so often and for so long a time seemed to call for 
a discoverer in vain. Notably this is the case with the two 
most important discoveries that have ever been made, and 
/j ' both in the fifteenth century — that of the art of printing 

and the finding of a new world. For thousands of years the world had 
transcribed its thought into permanent legible characters by means ot the 
stylus, the stalk of the papyrus, or the chisel. Slow and laborious were these 
methods, yet the splendid civilizations of the great Eastern Empires, the 
Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and the Medod 3 ersian, had produced their 
literature without the aid of the printing press, while the later civilizations of 
Greece and Rome — countries that gave to all coming time the noblest litera- 
tures — transcribed them by the painful process of the pen. 

The wonderful brain of the Greek could construct a Parthenon, the wonder 
of the age ; and the Roman reared that pile, so noble in its simplicity — the 
Pantheon ; yet neither could discern the little type that should make the rapid 

21 



22 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

multiplying of letters easy, nor place in relief upon a block of wood the tracery 
of a single leaf; and the wonder is no less, but increases as we consider the fact 
that two vast continents, the half of an entire planet, had for so many centuries 
eluded the gaze of men who went down to the sea in ships, who for centuries 
had navigated an inland sea for two thousand miles, while from Iceland and 
Jutland intrepid mariners and Buccaneers had plowed the ocean with their 
keels. 

For nearly three centuries before the angels sung at Bethlehem, Aristotle, 
following the teachings of the Pythagoreans, had asserted the spheroidicity 
of the earth, and had declared that the great Asiatic Empire could be reached 
by sailing westwardly, a view that was confirmed by Seneca, the Spaniard, who 
affirmed that India could be reached in this way ; and all down the centuries 
the probability of discovery, as we now look back upon those times, seems to 
be increasing ; but, somehow, Discovery still refused to enter the open gate 
leading to the New World, and this, notwithstanding the fact that the Canary 
and Madeira Islands had been discovered some years before, and the Portuguese 
navigators had followed the coast of Africa for thousands of miles, as far as 
the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus himself having skirted the coast to the 
Cape of Storms. The spheroidicity of the earth was generally accepted by 
enlightened men, though the Copernican system was not known, and it was 
believed that there must be a large unknown continent to the west. There 
was such a continent — two of them indeed — and they were nearer the African 
coast, along which Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian navigators had coursed, 
than the distance they had covered from the Pillars of Hercules to the Cape 
of Good Hope. Yet, though the times wanted a discoverer, he was not to be 
found. 

WAS AMERICA DISCOVERED BY THE NORSEMEN? 

This has long been a disputed question. Norse scholarship has always 
insisted upon the discovery ; scholars looking upon the matter from the outside 
have disputed the claim. One of the principal chains of evidence offered here- 
tofore has been supplied by the Norse Sagas — stories of mingled fact, 
romance and myth ; but they have been distrusted, and up to recent time the 
preponderance of evidence has rather been against the Icelandic claim. But 
latterly new evidence has been brought to light, which seems to fully establish the 
fact of the discovery of America by the Norsemen from Iceland, about A. D. 

IOOO. 

To cite the testimony of the Sagas, one must suffice for evidence in that 
direction. The Eyrbyggia Saga — the oldest extant manuscript, remains of 
which date back to about the year 1300 — has the following: "After the recon- 
ciliation between Steinhor and the people of Alpta-firth, Thorbrand's sons, 
Snorri and Thorleif, went to Greenland. Snorri went to Wineland the Good with 



WAS AMERICA DISCOVERED BY THE NORSEMEN? 23 

Karlsefni ; and when they were fighting with the Skrellings there in Wineland, 
Thorbrand Snorrason, a most valiant man, was killed." In the Icelandic Annals, 
also, the oldest of which is supposed to have been written in the south of 
Iceland about the year 1280, mention is made ot Vineland. In the year 1121 
it is recorded that " Bishop Eric Uppsi sought Wineland." The same entry is 
found in the chronological lists. These would seem to supply historical 
references to the Norse discovery of America, set down in such a manner as to 
indicate that the knowledge of the fact was widely diffused. 

One of the most interesting accounts taken from the Norse records is that 
found in a parchment discovered in a Monastery library of the Island of Flato, 







ON THE COAST OF NOVA SCOTIA. 



and which was transferred to Copenhagen and submitted to the inspection of 
Professor Rafn and other noted Icelandic scholars. Proiessor Rafn reproduces 
the record in his "Antiquities." The story is as follows: "In the year 996, 
while sailing from Iceland to Greenland, Biarne Heriulfson was driven southward 
by a storm, when they came in sight of land they had never before seen. Biarne 
did not try to land, but put his ship about and eventually reached Greenland. 
Four years after, in A. D. 1000. Leif the son of Eric the Red, sailed from 
Brattahlid in search of the land seen by Biarne. This land Eeif soon discovered ; 
he landed, it is supposed, on the coast of Labrador, which he named Helluland, 
because of the numerous flat stones found there, from the word hella, a fiat 
stone. 

Finding the shore inhospitable, he again set sail and soon reached a coast 



24 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

corresponding to Nova Scotia. This he called Markland (Woodland). Leif 
put to sea a third time, and after two days' buffeting landed, it is supposed, in 
Mount Hope Bay, in Rhode Island. Here the adventurers wintered, and noted 
that on the shortest day the sun rose at 7.30 a. m., and set at 4.30 p. m. After 
naming the newly discovered land Yineland, on account of the profusion of 
wild grapes, he returned in the following spring to Greenland." 

But it is only just to cite opinions on the other side. In his History Mr. 
Bancroft denies that the alleged discovery of the North American mainland is 
established by any clear historical evidence. He admits, indeed, that there is 
nothing intrinsically improbable in the notion that the colonizers of Greenland 
(and the early colonization of Greenland is admitted) may have explored the 
coast to the South. But the assertion that they actually did so rests, he says, 
on narratives "mythological in form, obscure in meaning, ancient, yet not 
contemporary." Mr. Justin YVinsor, the well-known historian, seems unwilling 
to admit the trustworthiness of the epical accounts of the voyages of the 
Northmen to the so-called Vineland. 

But a recent writer, Mr. Arthur Middleton Reeves, well versed in Scandi- 
navian and Icelandic literature, has lately come forward to maintain the reality 
of the discovery ascribed to the Northmen, and has set forth an imposing array 
of evidence and argument in support of his belief. Mr. Reeves finds his proofs 
not in the Sagas alone, which Bancroft and Winsor reject, but he has also 
gathered together the preceding references to the Vineland voyages, which are 
scattered through the early history of Iceland. From these last mentioned data 
it seems clearly demonstrable that 'the discovery of the American mainland took 
place, as has been claimed, about A. D. 1000, and was well known in Greenland 
and Iceland long before any of the three Sagas dealing with the theme were 
penned, for there is documentary proof reaching so far back as about the year 
1 1 10. 

Among the proofs brought forward, is the story as told by the Icelandic 
scholar, Ari the Learned, who was born in Iceland in the year 1067, and who 
died in 1148. In Ari's book, narrating the colonization of Greenland, he says 
that the settlers perceived, from the dwellings, the fragments of boats, and the 
stone implements, that the people had been there who inhabited Wineland, and 
whom the Greenlanders called " Skrellings." Furthermore, in the Collectanea 
of Middle-age Wisdom, a manuscript written partly in Icelandic and partly 
in Latin, between the years 1400 and 1450, it is stated that "southward from 
Greenland is Helluland ; thence is Markland ; thence it is not far to Wineland 
the Good. Leif the Lucky first found Greenland." In another historical vellum 
document it is stated that " from Greenland to the southward lies Helluland, 
then Markland, thence it is not far to Wineland ;" and in another vellum oi 
the year 1400, it is said "south from Greenland lies Helluland, then Markland, 



THE PERSONAL HI r STORY OF COLUMBUS. 



-5 



thence it is not far to Vineland." Still again — and the evidence must end with 
this citation — in an old manuscript, written according to the Icelandic scholar 
Dr. Vigfasson, as early as 1 260-1 280, referring to the date A. D. 1000, the manu- 
script records : " Wineland the Good found. That summer King Olaf sent Leif 
to Greenland, to proclaim Christianity there. He sailed that summer to Green- 
land. He found in the sea men upon a wreck, and helped them. There found 
he also Wineland the Good, and arrived in the autumn at Greenland." 

It is objected to the discovery of America from Greenland that no runic 
(Scandinavian) inscriptions have been found in any part of the North American 
continent. But the answer to this objection is that the Northmen never 
pretended that they had colonized 
Vineland ; they simply recounted their 
discovery of the country and their 
unsuccessful attempts to colonize it. 
Runic inscriptions, therefore, and other 
archaeological remains, are not to be 
expected in a region where no perma- 
nent settlements were made. Besides, 
as Mr. Reeves points out, the rigorous 
application of the test would make the 
discovery of Iceland itself disputable. 
In conclusion, as to this matter, we 
have only to add that the statements 
put forth seem not only to confirm what 
we meet with in the Sagas, but, taken 
by themselves alone, they seem to fully 
establish the fact of the discovery of 
America by the Icelanders, even had 
the Sagas never been written. And now 
coveries we come to 

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF COLUMBUS. 

It was the glory of Italy to furnish the greatest of the discoverers ot the 
New World. Not only Columbus, but Vespucci (or Vespucius), the Cabots, and 
Verazzani were born under Italian skies ; yet singularly enough the country of 
the Caesars was to gain not a square foot of territory for herself where other 
nations divided majestic continents between them. So, too, in the matter of 
Columbus biography and investigation, up to the present time but one Italian, 
Professor Francesco Tarducci, has materially added to the sum of the world's 
knowledge in a field pre-eminently occupied by Washington Irving, Henry 
Harrisse. and Roselly de Lorgues, a Frenchman, — these comprising the powerful 
original writers in Columbian biography. 




CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 



leaving the Norsemen and their dis- 



z6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



In treating our subject we naturally begin at the starting point of 
biography, the birthplace. The generally accepted statement has been that 
Columbus was born at Genoa, especially as Columbus begins his will with the 
well-known declaration, "I, being born in Genoa." 

But it has been asserted by numerous writers that in this Columbus 
was mistaken, just as for a long time General Sheridan was mistaken in 
supposing himself to have been born in a little Ohio town, when he learned, 

within a year or two of his death, 
that he was born in Albany, N. Y. 
But passing this, it remains to be 
said that the evidence of the Geno- 
ese birth of Columbus may now be 
considered as fully established. As 
to the time of his birth there has 
been not a little question. Henry 
Harrisse, the American scholar al- 
ready referred to, placed it between 
March 25th, 1446, and March 20th. 
1447. This, however, we can hardly 
accept, especially as it would make 
Columbus at the time of his first 
naval venture only thirteen years o\ 
age. Tarducci gives 1435 or 1436 
as the year of his birth. This is also 
the date given by Irving, and it 
would seem to be the most proba- 
ble. This is the almost decisive 
testimony of Andres Bernaldez, bet- 
ter known as the Curate of Los 
Palacios, who was most intimate with 
Columbus and had him a great deal 
in his house. He says the death oi 
Columbus took place in his seven- 
tieth year. His death occurred May 20th, 1506, which would make the year 
of his birth probably about 1436. And now starting with Genoa as the 
birthplace of Columbus and about the year 1435 or 1436 as the time of his 
birth, we proceed with our story. 

Christopher Columbus (or Columbo in Italian) was the son of Dominico 
Columbo and Susannah Fontanarossa his wife. The father was a wool carder, 
a business which seems to have been followed by the family through several 
eenerations. He was the oldest of four children, having two brothers, 




MONUMENT To COLUMBUS AT GENOA. 



COLUMBUS AT PORTUGAL. 27 

Bartholomew and Giacomo (James in English, in Spanish, Diego), and one 
sister. Of the early years of Columbus little is known. It is asserted by 
some that Columbus was a wool comber — no mean occupation in that day — 
and did not follow the sea. On the other hand, it is insisted — and Tarducci 
and Harrisse hold to that view — that, whether or not he enlisted in expeditions 
against the Venetians and Neapolitans (and the whole record is misty and 
uncertain), Columbus at an early age showed a marked inclination for the 
sea, and his education was largely directed along the lines of his tastes, and 
included such studies as geography, astronomy, and navigation. Certain it 
is that when Columbus arrived at Lisbon he was one of the best geographers 
and cosmographers of his age, and was accustomed to the sea from infancy.* 
Happily his was an age favorable for discovery. The works of travel were 
brought to the front. Pliny and Strabo, sometime forgotten names, were 
more than Sappho and Catullus, which a later but not a better age affected. 
The closing decade of the fifteenth century was a time of heroism, of deeds 
of daring, and discovery. Rude and unlettered to some extent, it may be 
conceded it was ; yet it was far more fruitful, and brought greater blessings 
to the world than are bestowed by the effeminate luxury which often character- 
izes a civilization too daintily pampered, too tenderly reared. Life then was 
at least serious. 

Right here it may be in place to state how invention promoted Columbian 
discovery. The compass had been known for six hundred years. But at this 
time the quadrant and sextant were unknown ; it became necessary to discover 
some means for finding the altitude of the sun, to ascertain one's distance 
from the equator. This was accomplished by utilizing the astralobe, an 
instrument only lately used by astronomers in their stellar work. This inven- 
tion gave an entirely new direction to navigation, delivering seamen from the 
necessity of always keeping near the shore, and permitting the little ships — 
small vessels they were — to sail free amidst the immensity of the sea, so that a 
ship that had lost its course, formerly obliged to grope its way back by the 
uncertain guidance of the stars, could now, by aid of compass and astralobe, 
retrace its course with ease. Much has justly been ascribed to the compass as 
a promoter of navigation ; but it is a question if the astralobe has not played 
quite as important a part. 

The best authorities place the arrival of Columbus at Lisbon about the year 
1470. It is probable Columbus was known by reputation to Alfonso V, King 
of Portugal. It is unquestionable that Columbus was attracted to Portugal 
by the spirit of discovery which prevailed throughout the Iberian peninsula, 
fruits of which were just beginning to be gathered. Prince Henry of Portugal, 

* Tarducci, I, 41. 



28 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



who was one of the very first of navigators, if not the foremost explorer of his 
day, had established a Naval College and Observatory, to which the most 
learned men were invited, while under the Portuguese flag the greater part of 
the African coast had been already explored. Having settled in Lisbon, at the 
Convent of All Saints, Columbus formed an acquaintance with Felipa Monis de 
Perestrello, daughter of Bartholomew de Perestrello, an able navigator but poor, 
with whom and two others Prince Henry had made his first discovery. The 
acquaintance soon ripened into love, and 
Columbus made her his wife. Felipa' s lather 




COLUMBUS'S ARRIVAL AT THE CONVENT OF LA RABIDA. 



soon died, and then with his wife and her mother Columbus moved to Porto 
Santo, where a son was born to them, whom they named Diego. Felipa hence- 
forth disappears from history ; there is no further record of her. At Porto 
Santo Columbus supported his family and helped sustain his aged father, who 
was living poorly enough off at Savona, and who was forced to sell the little 
property he had, and whose precarious living led him to make new loans and 
incur new debts. 



COLUMBUS AND THE KING OF PORTUGAL. 29 

Meanwhile Columbus was imbibing to the full the spirit of discovery so 
widely prevalent. It was not his wife who materially helped him at this time, as 
has been asserted, but his mother-indaw, who, observing the deep interest that 
Columbus took in all matters of exploration and discovery, gave him all the 
manuscripts and charts which her husband had made, which, with his own 
voyages to some recently discovered places, only renewed the burning desire 
for exploration and discovery. The leaven was rapidly working. 

But the sojourn at Portugal must be briefly passed over. The reports that 
came to his ears while living at Porto Santo only intensified his convictions of 
the existence of an empire to the West. He heard of great reeds and a bit of 
curiously carved wood seen at sea, floating from the West ; and vague rumors 
reached him at different times, of "strange lands" in the Atlantic — most if not 
all of them mythical. But they continued to stimulate interest as they show the 
state of public thought at that time respecting the Atlantic, whose western regions 
were all unknown. All the reports and all the utterances of the day Columbus 
watched with closest scrutiny. He secured old tomes for fullest information as 
to what the ancients had written or the moderns discovered. All this served to 
keep the subject fresh in his mind, nor would it " down," for his convictions were 
constantly ministered to by contemporary speculators. Toscanelli, an Italian 
mathematician, had written, at the instance of King Alfonso, instructions for a 
western route to Asia. With him Columbus entered into correspondence, 
which greatly strengthened his theories. 

Now they came to a head. Constant thought and reflection resulted in 
his conception of an especial course to take, which, followed for a specific time, 
would result in the discovery of an empire. And the end ! He would subdue 
a great trans-Atlantic empire, and from its riches he would secure the wealth to 
devote to expeditions for recovering the Holy Land, and so he would pay the 
Moors dearly for their invasion of the Iberian peninsula, — a truly fanciful but 
not a wholly unreasonable conception, as the times were. 

COLUMBUS AND THE KING OF PORTUGAL. 

At last he found means to lay his project before the King of Portugal. 
But the royal councillors treated the attempt to cross the Atlantic as rash and 
dangerous, and the conditions required by Columbus as exorbitant. The 
adventurous King, John II, — Alfonso had died in 1481 — had more faith in his 
scheme than his wise men, and, with a dishonesty not creditable to him, 
attempted at this time to reap the benefit of Columbus' studies and plans by 
sending out an expedition of his own in the direction and by the way traced in 
his charts. But the skill and daring of Columbus were wanting, and at the 
first mutterings of the sea the expedition sought safety in flight. It turned 
back to the Cape de Verde islands, and the officers took revenge for their 



30 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

disappointment by ridiculing the project of Columbus as the vision of a day 
dreamer. O, valiant voyagers ! — New Worlds are not discovered by such- 



men as you 



Columbus's brother Bartholomew had endeavored about this time to 
interest the British monarch in the project, but the first of the Tudors had too 
much to do in quelling insurrection at home, and in raising revenues by illegal 
means, to spend any moneys on visionary projects. Henry III would have 
none of him. 

Meantime, indignant at the infamous treatment accorded him, and with 
his ties to Portugal already sundered by the death of his wife, he determined 
to shake the dust of Portugal off his feet, and seek the Court of Spain. He 
would start at once for Cordova, where the Spanish Court then was. Leaving 
Lisbon secretly, near the close of 1484, he chose to follow the sea coast to Palos, 
instead of taking the direct inland route, and most happily so ; for, in so doing 
he was to gain a friend and a most important ally ; this circumstance the 
unthinking man will ascribe to chance, but the believer to Providence. Weary 
and foot-sore, on his journey, he finally arrived at Palos, then a small port on 
die Atlantic, at the mouth of the Tinto, in Andalusia ; here hunger and want 
drove him to seek assistance from the charity of the Monks, and ascending the 
steep mountain road to the Franciscan monastery of Santa Maria de La 
Rabida, he met the pious prior, Father Juan Perez, who, struck with his 
imposing presence, despite his sorry appearance, entered into conversation with 
him. 

As the interview grew in interest to both the parties, Columbus was led to 
impart to the prior his great project, to the prior's increasing wonder, for in Palos 
the spirit of exploration was as regnant as in Lisbon. Columbus was invited 
to make the Convent his place of sojourn, an invitation he was only too glad 
to accept. Then Father Perez sent for his friend, a well known geographer 
of Palos, and, deeply interested in all that related to exploration and the 
discovery of new lands, the three took the subject into earnest consideration, 
thorough discussion of the question being had. It was not long before 
Father Perez — all honor to his name ! — became deeply interested in the plans 
of Columbus. To glorify God is the highest aim to which one can address 
himself; of that feeling Father Perez was thoroughly possessed; and how 
could he more fully glorify him than by aiding in the discovery of new lands 
and the spreading of Christianity there ? Impelled by this feeling, he urged 
Columbus to proceed at once to Cordova, where the Spanish Court then was, 
giving him money for his journey, and a letter of commendation to his friend, 
the father prior of the monastery of El Prado Fernando de Talavera, the 
queen's Confessor, and a person of great influence at Court. There was hope, 
and there was a period of long and weary waiting yet before him. 



COLUMBUS AT THE SPANISH COURT. 31 

Arriving at Cordova, Columbus found the city a great military camp, and 
all Spain aroused in a final effort to expel the Moors. Fernando, the Confessor, 
was a very different man from Perez, and instead of treating Columbus kindly, 
received him coolly, and for a long while actively prevented him from meeting 
the king. The Copernican theory, though held by some, was not at this time 
established, and the chief reason why the Confessor opposed Columbus's 
plan was unquestionably because he measured a scientific theory by appeal 
to the Scriptures — just as the Sacred Congregation did in Galileo's case a 
century and a half later — just as some well-meaning but mistaken souls do 
to-day. 

At length, through the friendship of de Ouintanilla, Comptroller of the 
Castilian Treasury, Geraldini, the Pope's nuncio, and his brother, Allessandro, 
tutor of the children of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus was made known to 
Cardinal Mendoza, who introduced him to the king. Ferdinand listened to him 
patiently, and referred the whole matter to a council of learned men, mostly 
composed of ecclesiastics, under the presidency of the Confessor. Here again 
dogma supplanted science, and controverted Columbus's theories by Scriptural 
texts, and caused delay, so it was not till 1491 — Columbus had now been 
residing in Spain six years — that the Commission reported the project "vain 
and impossible, and not becoming great princes to engage in on such slender 
grounds as had been adduced." 

The report of the Commission seemed a death-blow to the hopes of 
Columbus. Disappointed and sick at heart, and disgusted at six years of 
delay, Columbus turned his back on Spain, "indignant at the thought of having 
been beguiled out of so many precious years of waning existence." Deter- 
mined to lay his project before Charles VIII, of France, he departed, and 
stopped over at the little Monastery of La Rabida, from whose Prior, Juan 
Perez, six years before, he had departed with such sanguine hopes, for 
Cordova. 

The good friar was greatly moved. Finally he concluded to make another 
and final effort. Presuming upon his position as the queen's Confessor, Perez 
made an appeal direct to Isabella, and this time with the result that an inter- 
view was arranged, at which Isabella was present. His proposals would have 
at once been accepted but that Columbus demanded powers * which even 

* His principal stipulations were (1) that he should have, for himself during his life, and 
his heirs and successors forever, the office of admiral in all the lands and continents which he 
might discover or acquire in the ocean, with similar honors and prerogatives to those enjoyed by 
the high admiral of Castile in his district. (2) That he should be viceroy and governor-general 
over all the said lands and continents, with the privilege of nominating three candidates for the 
government of each island or province, one of whom should be selected by the sovereigns. (3) 
That he should be entitled to reserve for himself one-tenth of all pearls, precious stones, gold, silver, 



32 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



de Talavera pronounced "arbitrary and 
presumptuous," though they were of like 
character with those conceded by Portu- 
gal to Vasco de Gamba. Angered and in- 
dignant at the rejection of his terms, 
which were conditioned 
only upon his success, 
Columbus impulsively 
left the royal presence, 
and taking leave of 
his friends, set 
, out for France, 

determined to 



offer his services to 
Louis XII. 




ISABELLA HAS A SOBER 
SECOND THOUGHT. 

But no sooner 
had Columbus gone, 
than the queen, who we may 
believe regretted the loss of 
possible glory of discovery, 
hastily despatched a messen- 
ger after him, who overtook 
him when two leagues away 
and brought him back. 

Although Ferdinand 



spices, and all other articles and merchan- 
dises, in whatever manner found, bought, 
bartered, or gained within his admiralty, the 
cost being first deducted. (4) That he, or 
his lieutenant, should be the sole judge in 
all causes and disputes arising out of traffic 
between those countries and Spain, provided 
the high admiral of Castile had similar 
jurisdiction in his district. 



COLUMBUS AND THE MESSENGER. 



FITTING OUT THE EXPEDITION. 



33 



was opposed to the project, Isabella concluded to yield to Columbus his terms 
and agreed to advance the cost, 14,000 florins, about $7,000, from her own 
revenues, and so to Spain was saved the empire of a New World. On May 12 
Columbus took leave of the king and queen to superintend the fitting out of 
the expedition at the port of Palos. The hour and the man had at last met. 



FITTING OUT THE EXPEDITION. 

What thoughts and apprehensions filled the heart and mind of Columbus 
as he at last saw the yearning desires of years about to be met, may be to some 
extent conceived ; they certainly cannot be expressed. Not a general at the 
head of his great army who, at a critical moment in battle, sees the enemy make 
the false move which insures him the victory, could feel more exultant than 
Columbus must have felt when he left the pres- 
ence of the Spanish Court, and, after seven years 
of weary and all but hopeless waiting at last saw 
the possibilities of the great unknown opening up 
before him, and beheld, in a vision to him as clear 
and radiant as the sun shining in the heavens, a 
New World extending its arms and welcoming him 
to her embrace. It would seem as if everything 
now conspired to atone for the disappointing past. 
His old tried friend, Perez, prior of the La Rabida 
monastery, near Palos, received him with open arms, 
and well he might, for had not his kind offices 
made success possible ? And the authorities, as if 
to make good the disappointments of seven years, 
could not now do too much. All public officials, of 
all ranks and conditions in the maritime borders of 
Andalusia were commanded to furnish supplies and 
assistance of all kinds. Not only so, but as superstition and fear made ship 
owners reluctant to send their vessels on the expedition, the necessary ships 
and men were to be provided, if need be, by impressment, and it was in this 
way vessels and men were secured. 

In three months the expedition was ready to sail. The courage of 
Columbus in setting sail in untried waters becomes more evident when we 
consider the size of the ships comprising the little expedition. They were 
three in number ; the largest of them, the Santa Maria, was only ninety feet 
long, being about the size of our modern racing yachts. Her smaller consorts, 
the Pinta and the Nina, were little caravels, very like our fishing smacks, 
without any deck to keep the water out. The Santa Maria had four masts, 
of which two were square rigged, and two fitted with lateen sails like those 

3 




CARAVELS OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. 
(After an engraving published in rjgj.) 



34 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

used on the Nile boats ; this vessel Columbus commanded. Martin Alonzo 
Pinzon commanded the Pinta, and his brother, Yincente Yaiiez Pinzon, the 
Nina. The fleet was now all ready for sea ; but before setting sail Columbus 
and most of his officers and crew confessed to Friar Juan Perez, and partook 
of the Sacrament. Surely such an enterprise needed the blessing of heaven, 
if any did ! 

It was before sunrise on Friday morning, August 3, 1492, that Columbus, 
with 30 officers and adventurers and 90 seamen, in all 120 souls, set sail, "in 
the name of Christ," from behind the little island of Saltes. Those inclined to 
be superstitious regarding Friday will do well to note that it was on a Friday 
Columbus set sail from Palos ; it was on Friday, the 12th of October, that he 
landed in the New World ; on a Friday he set sail homeward ; on a Friday, 
again, the 15th of February, 1493, land was sighted on his return to Europe, 
and that on Friday, the 15th of March, he returned to Palos. The story of that 
eventful trip has never ceased to charm the world, nor ever will so long as 
the triumphs of genius, the incentives of religion, and the achievements of 
courage have interest for mankind. 

It was Columbus's intention to steer southwesterly for the Canary Islands, 
and thence to strike due west — due to misconception occasioned by the very 
incorrect maps of that period. On the third day out the Pinta's rudder was 
found to be disabled and the vessel leaking, caused, doubtless, by her owner, 
who did not wish his vessel to go, — the ship having been impressed — and 
thinking to secure her return. Instead of this, Columbus continued on his 
course and decided to touch at the Canaries, which he reached on the 9th. 
Here he was detained for some weeks, till he learned from a friendly sail that 
three Portuguese war vessels had been seen hovering off the island Gomera. 
where he was taking in wood, water, and provisions. Apprehensive, and 
probably rightly so, that the object was to capture his fleet, Columbus lost 
no time in putting to sea. 

AND NOW FOR THE NEW WORLD. 

It was early morning on the 6th of September that Columbus again set 
sail, steering due west, on an unknown sea. He need fear no hostile fleets, 
and he was beyond the hindrance of plotting enemies on shore ; and yet so far 
from escaping trouble it seemed as if he had but plunged into deeper tribulations 
and trials than ever. 

As the last trace of land faded from view the hearts of the crews failed 
them. They were going they knew not where ; would they ever return ? 
Tears and loud lamentings followed, and Columbus and his officers had all they 
could do to calm the men. After leaving the Canaries the winds were light and 
baffling, but always from the East. On the 11th of September, when about 



AN ASTRONOMIC DISCOVERY. 



35 



450 miles west of Ferro, they saw part of 
a mast floating by, which, from its size, 
appeared to have belonged to a vessel of 
about 120 tons burden. To the crew this 
meant the story of wreck ; why not pro- 
phetic of their own ? The discovery only 
added to their fears. And now a remark- 
able and unprecedented phenomenon pre- 





sented itself. " As true 
as the needle to the 
pole" may be a pretty 
simile, but it is false in 
fact. For, on the 13th 
of September, at night- 
fall, Columbus, for the 
first time in all his experience, discovered that the needle did not point to 
the North star, but varied about half a point, or five and a half degrees to the 
northwest. As he gave the matter close attention Columbus found the variation 



THE ECLIPSE OF THE SUN, AS PREDICTED UY Cc >I.CMU'S. 



36 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to increase with every day's advance. This discovery, at first kept secret, 
was early noticed by the pilots, and soon the news spread among the crews, 
exciting their alarm. If the compass was to lose its virtues, what was to become 
of them on a trackless sea? Columbus invented a theory which was ingenious 
but failed wholly to allay the terror. He told them that the needle pointed to 
an exact point, but that the star Polaris revolved, and described a circle around 
the pole. Polaris docs revolve around a given point, but its apparent motion is 
slow, while the needle does not point to a definite fixed point. The true expla- 
nation of the needle variations — sometimes it fluctuates thirty or forty degrees — 
is to be found in the flowing of the electrical currents through the earth in 
different directions, upon which the sun seems to have an effect. 

Columbus took observations of the sun every day, with an astralobe, and 
shrewdly kept two logs every day. One of these, prepared in secret, contained 
the true record of the daily advance ; the other, showing smaller progress, was 
for the crew, by which means they were kept in ignorance of the great 
distance they were from Spain. 

INDICATIONS OF LAND. 

On the 14th of September the voyagers discovered a water-wagtail and a 
heron hovering about the ships, signs which were taken as indicating the 
nearness of land, and which greatly rejoiced the sailors. On the night of the 
1 5th a meteor fell within five lengths of the Santa Maria. On the 1 6th the 
ships entered the region of the trade winds ; with this propitious breeze, 
directly aft, the three vessels sailed gently but quickly over a tranquil sea, so 
that for many days not a sail was shifted. This balmy weather Columbus 
constantly refers to in his diary, and observes that "the air was so mild that it 
wanted but the song of nightingales to make it like the month of April in 
Andalusia." On the iSth of September the sea, as Columbus tells us, was "as 
calm as the Guadalquiver at Seville." Air and sea alike continued to furnish 
evidences of life and indications of land, and Pinzon, on the Pinta, which, being 
the fastest sailer, generally kept the lead, assured the admiral that indications 
pointed to land the following day. On the 19th, soundings were taken and no 
bottom found at two hundred fathoms. On the 20th, several birds visited the 
ships ; they were small song birds, showing they could not have come a very 
long distance ; all of which furnished cause for encouragement. 

But still discontent was growing. Gradually the minds of the men were 
becoming diseased through terror, even the calmness of the weather increasing 
their fears, for with such light winds, and from the east, too, how were they 
ever to get back ? However, as if to allay their feelings, the wind soon shifted 
to the southwest. 

A little after sunset on the 25th, Columbus and his officers were examining 



INDICATIONS OF LAND. 37 

their charts and discussing the probable location of the island Cipango,* which 
the admiral had placed on his map, when from the deck of the Pinta arose the 
cry of " Land ! Land ! " At once Columbus fell on his knees and gave thanks 
to Heaven. Martin Alonzo and his crew of the Pinta broke out into the 
"Gloria in Excelsis," in which the crew of the Santa Maria joined, while 
the men of the Nina scrambled up to the masthead and declared that they, 
too, saw land. At once Columbus ordered the course of the vessels to be 
changed toward the supposed land. In impatience the men waited for the 
dawn, and when the morning appeared, lo ! the insubstantial pageant had faded, 
the cloud-vision, for such it was, had vanished into thin air. The disappoint- 
ment was as keen as the enthusiasm had been intense ; silently they obeyed the 
admiral's order, and turned the prows of their vessels to the west again. 

A week passed, marked by further variations of the needle and flights of 
birds. The first day of October dawned with such amber weather as is common 
on the Atlantic coast in the month of " mists and yellow fruitfulness." The 
pilot on Columbus's ship announced sorrowfully that they were then 520 leagues, 
or 1560 miles, from Ferro. He and the crew were little aware that they had 
accomplished 707 leagues, or nearly 2200 miles. And Columbus had a strong 
incentive for this deception ; for, had he not often told them that the length of 
his voyage would be 700 leagues ? — and had they known that this distance had 
already been made, what might they not have done ! On the 7th of October the 
Nina gave the signal for land, but instead of land, as they advanced the vision 
melted and their hopes were again dissipated. 

The ship had now made 750 leagues and no land appeared. Possibly he 
had made a mistake in his latitude ; and so it was that, observing birds flying 
to the southward, Columbus changed his course and followed the birds, recalling, 
as he says in his journal, that by following the flight of birds going to their 
nesting and feeding grounds the Portuguese had been so successful in their 
discoveries. On Monday, the 8th, the sea was calm, with fish sporting every- 
where in great abundance ; flocks of birds and wild ducks passed by. Tuesday 
and Wednesday there was a continual passage of birds. On the evening of 
this day, while the vessels were sailing close together, mutiny suddenly broke 
out. The men could trust to signs no longer. With cursing and imprecation 

* Cipango was an imaginative island based upon the incorrect cosmography of Toscanelli, 
whose map was accepted in Columbus's time as the most nearly correct chart of any extant. The 
Ptolemaic theory of 20,400 geographical miles as the Equatorial girth was accepted by Columbus, 
which lessened his degrees of latitude and shortened the distance he would have to sail to reach 
Asia. The island Cipango was supposed to be over 1000 miles long, running north and south, 
and the distance placed at 52 degrees instead of the 230 degrees which actually separates the coast 
of Spain from the eastern coast of Asia. The island was placed in about the latitude of the 
Gulf of Mexico. 



LAND, 110! 39 

they declared they would not run on to destruction, ami insisted upon returning 
to Spain. Then Columbus showed the stuff he was made of. He and they, he 
said, were there to obey the commands of their Sovereigns ; they must find the 
Indies. With unruffled calmness he ordered the voyage continued. 

On Thursday, the nth, the spirit of mutiny gave way to a very different 
feeling, for the signs of the nearness of land multiplied rapidly. They saw a 
green fish known to feed on the rocks, then a branch with berries on it, 
evidently recently separated from a tree, Boated by them, and above all, a 
rudely carved staff was seen. Once more gloom and mutiny gave way to 
sanguine expectation. All the indications pointing to land in the evening, the 
ships stood to the w'est, and Columbus, assembling his men, addressed them. 
He thought land might be made that night, and enjoined that a vigilant lookout 
be kept, and ordered a double watch set. He promised a silken doublet, in 
addition to the pension guaranteed by the Crown, to the one first seeing land. 

LAND, IK) ! 

That night, the ever memorable night of Thursday, opening into the 
morning of Friday, the 12th of October, not a soul slept on any vessel. The 
sea was calm and a good breeze filled the sails, moving the ships along at 
twelve miles an hour ; they were on the eve of an event such as the world had 
never seen, could never see again. The musical rippling of the waves and the 
creaking of the cordage were all the sounds that were audible, for the birds 
had retired to rest. The hours passed slowly by. It was just past midnight 
when the admiral, with restless eye, sought to penetrate the darkness. Then a 
far-off light came to his vision. Calling Guiterrez, a court officer, he also saw 
it. At two in the morning a gun from the Pinta, which led the other boats, 
gave notice that land was at last found. A New World had indeed been 
discovered. The hopes of years had attained their fruition. It was Rodrigo de 
Triana, a seaman, who first saw land — though, alas ! he received neither promised 
doublet nor pension. Friday, the 12th of October, 1492, corresponding to the 
2 1 st of October, 1892, of the present calendar, was the ever memorable day. 

The morning light came, and, lifting the veil that had concealed the 
supreme object of their hopes, revealed a low, beautiful island, not fifty miles 
long, and scarcely two leagues away. Columbus gave the signal to cast anchor 
and lower the boats, the men to carry arms. Dressed in a rich costume of 
scarlet, and bearing the royal standard, upon which was painted the image of 
the crucified Christ, he took the lead, followed by the other captains, Pinzon and 
Yanez. Columbus was the first to land ; and as soon as he touched the shore 
he fell down upon his knees and fervently kissed "the blessed ground" three 
times, returning thanks to God for the great favor bestowed upon him. The 
others followed his example ; and then, recognizing the Providence which had 



THE NEWLY FOUND LAND. 41 

crowned his efforts with success, he gave the name of the Redeemer — San 
Salvador — to the discovered island, which was called by the natives " Guana- 
hani." * And now the crews, who but a few days previously had reviled and 
cursed Columbus, gathered around, asking pardon for their conduct and prom- 
ising complete submission in future. 

Columbus supposed at last he had reached the opulent land of the Indies, 
and so called the natives Indians. But it was an island, not a continent or an 
Asiatic empire, he had found; an island "very large and level, clad with the 
freshest trees, with much water in it, a vast lake in the middle, and no 
mountains." 

The natives dwelling on the island were found to be a well-proportioned 
people with fine bodies, simple in their habits and customs, friendly, though shy 
in manner, and they were perfectly naked. They thought the huge ships to be 
monsters risen from the sea or gods come down from heaven. Presents were 
exchanged with them, including gold bracelets worn by the natives. Inquiry 
was made as to where the gold came from. For answer the natives pointed by 
gestures to the southwest. Columbus tried to induce some of the natives to go 
with him and show where the land of gold was to be found. But this they 
refused to do; so on the next day (Sunday, the 14th), taking along by force 
seven natives, that he might instruct them in Spanish and make interpreters of 
them, he set sail to discover, if possible, where gold was to be had in such 
abundance, and which, he thought, must be Cipango. 



* It is simply impossible to say which one of that long stretch of islands, some 3000 in 
number, extending from the coast of Florida to Haiti, as if forming a breakwater for the island oi 
Cuba, Guanahani is. Opinion greatly varies. San Salvador, or Cat Island, was in early favor; 
Humboldt and Irving — the latter having the problem worked out for him by Captain A. S. 
Mackenzie, U.S.N. — favored that view. The objections are that it is not "a small island" as 
Columbus called it, and it does not answer to the description of having "a vast lake in the 
middle" as Columbus says of Guanahani in his journal. Navette advocates the Grand Turk 
Island which has the lake. Watling's Island was first advocated by Mufioz and accepted by 
Captain Beecher, R. N., in 1856, and Oscar Perchel in 1858. Major, of the British Museum, has 
taken up with Watling's Island, as did Lieutenant J. B. Murdoch, U. S. N., after a careful 
examination in 1884. This view is accepted by C. A. Schott of the U. S. Coast Survey. On the 
other hand, Captain G. V. Fox, U. S. N., in 1880, put forth an elaborate claim for Samana, based 
upon a very careful examination of the route as given in Columbus's journal. This claim, with 
careful consideration of other conditions, has been very carefully examined by Mr. Charles H. 
Rockwell, an astronomer, of Tarrytown, N. Y. Mr. Rockwell assents to Captain Fox's view, 
which he finds confirmed by the course Columbus took in bringing his ship to land. He also 
traverses Captain Beecher's claim for Watling's Island, which he finds to be inconsistent with 
Columbus's narrative. As we have said, the problem is beset with difficulties, both as relates to 
the sailing course, and the extent and topography of the island ; and at the present time it appears 
to be well-nigh insoluble. Where the external conditions are met, the internal conditions, including 
the large lake, seem wanting ; the difficulties in the case seem to be irresistible. 



42 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

He was, of course, in the midst of the Bahama group, and did not have to 
sail far to discover an island. On the 15th he discovered the island Conception. 
On the third day he repeated the forms of landing and took possession, as he 
did also on the 16th, when he discovered an island which he called Fernandina, 
known to be the island at present called Exuma. On the 10th another island 
was discovered, which Columbus named Isabella, and which he declared to be 
" the most beautiful of all the islands " he had seen. The breezes brought 
odors as spicy as those from Araby the Blest ; palm trees waved their fringed 
banners to the wind, and flocks of parrots obscured the sky. It was a land 
where every prospect pleased and Nature bestowed her largesse, from no 
stinted hand. 

But no — it was not a land of gold. Leaving Isabella after a five days' 
sojourn, on Friday, the 26th of October, he entered the mouth of a beautiful river 
on the northeast terminus of the island of Cuba, where sky and sea seem to 
conspire to produce endless halcyon days, for the air was a continual balm and 
the sea bathes the grasses, which grow to the water's edge, whose tendrils and 
roots are undisturbed by the sweep of the tides. Upon the delights that came to 
Columbus in this new-found paradise we cannot dwell ; admiration and rapture 
mingled with the sensations that swept over the soul of the great navigator 
as he contemplated the virgin charms of a new world won by his valor. 

But the survey of succeeding events must be rapid. From the 28th of 
October till November 12th Columbus explored the island, skirting the shore in 
a westerly direction. He discovered during that time tobacco, of which he 
thought little, but which, singularly enough, proved more productive to the 
Spanish Crown than the gold which he sought but did not find. 

On the 20th of November Columbus was deserted by Martin Pinzon, 
whose ship, the Pinta, could outsail all the others. Martin would find gold for 
himself. This was a kind of treachery which too often marred the story of 
Spanish exploration in the New World. 

For two weeks after the Pinta's desertion Columbus skirted slowly along 
the coast of Cuba eastwardly till he doubled the cape. Had he only kept on 
what was now a westerly course he would have discovered Mexico. But it was 
not to be. Before sailing he lured on board six men, seven women, and three 
children, a proceeding which nothing can justify. Taking a southwesterly 
course, on Wednesday, December 5th, Columbus discovered Haiti and San 
Domingo, which he called Hispaniola, or Little Spain. The next day he 
discovered the island Tortuga, and at once returned to Haiti, exploring the 
island ; there, owing to disobedience of orders, on Christmas morning, between 
midnight and dawn, the Santa Maria was wrecked upon a sand-bank, near the 
present site of Port au Paix. A sorry Christmas for Columbus, indeed ! 

The situation was now critical. The Pinta, with her mutinous commander 



COLUMBUS RETURNS TO SPA IX. 43 

and crew, was gone ; the Santa Maria was a wreck. But one little vessel 
remained, the little, undecked Nina. Suppose she should be lost, too ? — how 
would Spain ever know of his grand discoveries ? Two things were necessary : 
he must at once set out on his return voyage, and some men must be left 
behind. The first thing he did was to build, on a bay now known as Caracola, 
a fort, using the timbers of the wrecked Santa Maria. In this he placed thirty- 
nine men. Nature would surely give them all the shelter and provisions they 
needed. 

COLUMBUS RETURNS TO SPAIN. 

It was not until Friday, January 4, 1493, that the weather was sufficiently 
favorable so that Columbus could hoist sail and stand out of the harbor of the 
Villa de Navidad, as he named the fort, because of his shipwreck, which 
occurred on the day of the Nativity. Two days later the ship Pinta was encoun- 
tered. Pinzon on the first opportunity boarded the Nina, and endeavored, 
but unsuccessfully, to explain his desertion and satisfy the admiral. The two 
vessels put into a harbor on the island of Cuba for repairs, and continued to 
sail along the coast, now and then making a harbor. On Wednesday, the 16th 
day of January, 1493, they bade farewell to the Queen of the Antilles, and then 
the prows of the Nina and the Pinta, the latter the slower sailer because of an 
unsound mast, were turned toward Spain, 1450 leagues away. 

It is not possible within the limits of this chapter to follow Columbus from 
day to day as he sails a sea now turbulent and tempestuous, as if to show its 
other side, in marked contrast to the soft airs and smooth waters that had 
greeted the voyagers when their purpose held — 

"To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
Of all the western stars." 

Nor can we follow with minuteness Columbus in his subsequent career. He had 
made the greatest discovery of his or any other age : he had found the New 
World, and this, more than anything else, has to do with " The Story of America." 
It was on Friday, March 15, 1493, just seven months and twelve days after 
leaving Palos, that Columbus dropped anchor near the island of Saltes. It was 
not until the middle of April that he reached Barcelona, where the Spanish 
Court was sitting. As he journeyed to Court his procession was a most 
imposing one as it thronged the streets, his Indians leading the line, with birds 
of brilliant plumage, the skins of unknown animals, strange plants and orna- 
ments from the persons of the dusky natives shimmering in the air. When he 
reached the Alcazar or palace of the Moorish Kings, where Ferdinand and 
Isabella were seated on thrones, the sovereigns rose and received him standing. 
Then they commanded him to sit, and learned from him the story of his discovery. 
Then and there the sovereigns confirmed all the dignities previously bestowed. 



44 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The rejoicing over, the good news spread everywhere, and Columbus was 
the hero of the civilized world. Ferdinand and Isabella at once addressed 
themselves to the task of preserving and extending their conquests, and a fleet 
of seventeen vessels and fifteen hundred men was organized to prosecute 
further discovery. It was on September 25/1493, that Columbus set sail with 
his fleet. On the 3d of November he sighted land, a small, mountainous island, 
which Columbus called Dominica, after Sunday, the day of discovery. Then 
again they set sail, and in two weeks discovered several islands in the Caribbean 
waters. It was not till November 27th that Columbus arrived in the harbor of 
La Navidad. He fired a salute, but there was no response. On landing the 
next morning, he found the fortress gone to pieces and the tools scattered, with 
evidences of fire. Buried bodies were discovered — twelve corpses — those of 
white men. Of the forty who had been left there, not one was present to tell 
the tale. But all was soon revealed, and a harrowing, sorrowful tale it was. 
From a friendly chief, Guacanagari — whom Columbus at first suspected of 
treachery, and was never quite satisfied of his innocence — it was learned that 
mutiny, perfidy, and lust had aroused resentments and produced quarrels, 
resulting in a division into two parties, who, separating and wandering off, were 
easily overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the incensed natives. 

Having discovered the Windward Islands, Jamaica, and Porto Rico, he 
founded a new colony in Hispaniola (Haiti or San Domingo), which he named 
Isabella, in honor of his queen. The place had a finer harbor than the ill-fated 
port of the Nativity. He named his brother Bartolommeo lieutenant governor, 
to govern when he should be absent on his explorations. On February 2, 
1494, Columbus sent back to Spain twelve caravels under the command of 
Antonio de Torres, retaining the other five for the use of the colony, with which 
he remained. The vessels carried specimens of gold and samples of the rarest 
and most notable plants. 

Besides these, the ships carried to Spain five hundred Indian prisoners, who, 
the admiral wrote, might be sold as slaves at Seville — an act which places an 
indelible stain upon the brilliant renown of the great admiral : that one inhuman 
act admits of no palliation whatever. 

Of the troubles that ensued it is impossible to give any account in detail. 
Men returning, disappointed at not finding themselves enriched, complained of 
Columbus as a deceiver, and he was charged with cruelty, and, indeed, there was 
scarcely a crime that presumably was not laid at his door. Then troubles broke 
out in the colony ; the friar, incensed at Columbus, excommunicated him, and the 
admiral, in return, cut off his rations. Then the men, in the absence of Columbus, 
off on trips of exploration, gave way to rapine and passion, and the poor natives 
had no other means than flight to save their wives and daughters. Matters 
proceeded from bad to worse, the colony growing weaker through dissension. 



COLUMBUS SETS FORTH ON A THIRD EXPEDITION. 



45 



Finally four vessels from Spain arrived at Isabella, in October, 1495, laden with 
welcome supplies. These were in charge of Torres, who was accompanied by 
a royal commissioner, Aquado, who was empowered to make full investigation 
of the charges brought against Columbus. It was evident to the admiral that 
he should take early occasion to return to Spain and make explanation to his 
sovereigns. Accordingly, in the spring of 1496, Columbus set sail for Cadiz, 
where he arrived on June 11, 1496. He was well received, and was successful 
in defending himself against the many charges and the clamor raised against 
him. Ships for a third voyage 
were promised him, but it was 
not until the late spring of 1498 . \ 
that the expedition was ready for 
sailing. 

COLUMBUS SETS FORTH ON A THIRD 
EXPEDITION. 

On May 30, 1498, with six 
ships, carrying two hundred men, 
besides sailors, Columbus set out 
on his third expedition. Taking 
a more southerly course, Colum- 
bus discovered the mouth of the 
Orinoco, which he imagined to 
be the great river Gihon, men- 
tioned in the Bible (Genesis ii, 13) 
as the second river of Paradise; 
so sadly were our admiral's geo- 
graphy and topography awry ! 
Columbus also discovered the 
coast of Para and the islands of 
Trinidad, Margarita, and Cabaqua, 
and then bore away for Hispaniola. 

It was the old story told over again, with sickening disappointment. 1 le 
found the colony was more disorganized than ever. For more than two years 
Columbus did his best to remedy the fortunes of the colony. At last an 
insurrection broke out. It was necessary to act promptly and decisively. Seven 
ringleaders were hanged and five more were sentenced to death. At this time 
the whole colony was surprised by the arrival at St. Domingo of Francisco de 
Bobadilla, sent out by Ferdinand and Isabella as governor, and bearing 
authority to receive from Columbus the surrender of all fortresses and public 
property. Calumny had done its work ! Bobadilla then released the five 




HAYTIAN INDIAN LIP I. 



4 6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



men under sentence of death, and finally, when Columbus and Bartholo- 
mew arrived at St. Domingo, Bobadilla caused them both to be put in 
chains, to be sent to Spain. Seldom has a more touching, more cruel, more 
pathetic picture been presented in the world's sad history of cruelty and 
wrong ! 

Shocked as the master of the ship was at the spectacle of Columbus in 
irons, he would have taken them off, but Columbus would not allow it ; those 
bracelets should never come off but at the command of his Sovereigns ! It was 
early in October, 1 500, that the ships with the three prisoners, Columbus and 




COLUMBUS IN IRONS. 



his brothers, Bartholomew and Diego, left Isabella. On the 25th of November, 
after an unusually comfortable passage, the vessels entered the harbor of Cadiz. 
The sight of the venerable form of Columbus in chains as he passed through 
the streets of Cadiz, where he had been greeted with all the applause of a 
conqueror, was more than the public would suffer. Long and loud were the 
indignant protests that voiced the popular feeling. The news of the state of 
affairs coming to Isabella, a messenger was dispatched with all haste to Cadiz, 
commanding his instant release. When the poor broken-hearted admiral came 
into the queen's presence Isabella could not keep the tears back — while he, 



HIS I AST VOYAGE. 47 

affected at the sight, threw himself at the feet of his sovereigns, his emotion 
bursting out in uncontrollable tears and sobs — and this was Columbus's 
reward for discovering a new world ! 

HIS LAST VOYAGE. 

The rest is soon told. The acts of the miserable creature, Bobadilla, were 
instantly disapproved, and he was recalled, but was drowned on his way home. 
Columbus, however, was not allowed to return to Hispaniola, but after two 
years' waiting sailed from Cadiz, May 9, 1502, with four vessels and a hundred 
and fifty men, to search for a passage through the sea now known as the Gulf 
of Mexico. It was the middle of June when Columbus touched at San 
Domingo, where he was not permitted to land. He set sail, and was dragged 
by the currents near Cuba. Here he reached the little island of Guanaja, 
opposite Honduras, and voyaged along the Mosquito coast, having discovered 
the mainland, of which he took possession. After suffering from famine and 
many other forms of hardship, he went to Jamaica and passed a terrible year 
upon that wild coast. In June, 1504, provision was made for returning to 
Spain, and on November 7th of that year, after a stormy voyage and narrow 
escape from shipwreck, Columbus landed at San Lucar de Barrameda, and 
made his way to Seville. He found himself without his best friend and pro- 
tector, for Isabella was then on her death-bed. Nineteen clays later she 
breathed her last. Ferdinand would do nothing for him. A year and a half of 
poverty and disappointment followed, and then his kindliest friend, Death, came 
to his relief, and his sorrows were at an end. Columbus died on Ascension 
Day, May 20, 1506, at Valladolid, in the act of repeating, Pater, hi manus tuas 
depono spiritum meum, — "Lord, into Thy hands I commit my spirit." Death 
did not end his voyages. His remains, first deposited in the Monastery of 
St. Francis, were transferred, in 15 13, to the Carthusian Monastery, of Las 
Cuevas. In 1536 his body, with that of his son, Diego, was removed to Hispa- 
niola, and placed in the cathedral of San Domingo, where it is believed, and 
pretty nearly certain, they were recently discovered. There seems no sufficient 
evidence that they were ever taken to Havana. 

Thus passed away the greatest of all discoverers, a man noble in purpose, 
daring in action, not without serious faults, but one inspired by deep religious 
feeling, and whose character must be leniently measured by the spirit of the age 
in which he lived. He received from his country not even the reward of the 
flattering courtier, for he was deprived of the honors his due, and for which the 
royal word had gone forth ; and in the end, when the weight of years was upon 
him and there was nothing more he could discover, he was allowed by Ferdinand 
to die in poverty, "with no place to repair to except an inn." But if Ferdinand 
was not a royal giver Columbus was more than one. For the world will never 



4 8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

forget the inscription that, for very shame, was placed upon a marble tomb over 
his remains — he was now seven years dead — and which reads : — 

" A Castilla y a Leon 
Nuevo mundo dio Colon." 
To Castile and Leon Columbus gave a new world. 

As to the character of Columbus, there is wanting space here for consider- 
ing the subject at any length ; nor does it at all seem necessary. Time has 
given the great navigator a character for courage, daring, and endurance, which 
no modern historian can take from him — least of all can the statement, that the 
falsification of the record of his voyage was reprehensible, stand. It was no 
more reprehensible than the act of Washington in deceiving the enemy at 
Princeton ; and in Columbus's case his foes were the scriptural ones " of his own 
household." Living in an age when buccaneering was honorable and piracy 
reputable, it will not do to gauge Columbus by the standard of our day. It is 
sufficient to say that he was great, in the fact that he put in practice what others 
had only dreamed of. Aristotle was sure of the spheroidicity of the earth, and 
was certain that "strange lands" lay to the west: Columbus sailed and Jound ; 
— he went, he saw, he conquered. And these pages cannot better be brought 
to a close than by quoting what one of the most thoughtful of recent poets, 
Arthur Hugh Clough, has expressed in his lines, prompted no doubt by his visit 
to this country : — 

" What if wise men had, as far back as Ptolemy, 
Judged that the earth like an orange was round, 
None of them ever said, ' Come along, follow me, 
Sail to the West and the East will be found ' 
Many a day before 
Ever they'd come ashore, 
From the ' San Salvador,' 
Sadder and wiser men, 
They'd have turned back again ; 
And that he did not, but did cross the sea, 
Is a pure wonder, I must say, to me." 

M. H. B. 




CHAPTER II. 

POST-COLUMBIAN EXPLORERS AND DISCOVERERS. 

O SOONER had the news of the successful results achieved 
by Columbus reached Spain, than it spread like wild-fire 
through the then civilized world. The three other great 
maritime powers, — Portugal, England, and France, — were es- 
pecially aroused to discover, if possible, lands for themselves. 
On the one side were Ferdinand and Isabella, who were 
determined to acquire and hold "the strange lands to the 
west," whose possession had been guaranteed them by the 
Pope. On the other hand, there were the three other great powers, with whom 
desire of conquest and dominion existed no less strongly than with Spain. 
These nations were resolved to do all that lay in their power to acquire 
dominion ; whatever difficulty might arise with Spain could be settled later. 

The first country to compete with Spain in western discovery was England, 
and the first one to follow in the footsteps of Columbus was John Cabot, who, 
with his son Sebastian, was destined to make important discoveries which 
would hand the name of Cabot down to history as surely as that of the great 
pioneer discoverer, Columbus, himself. 

It was as early as 1492 that Senor Puebla, then the Spanish Ambassador 
to the Court of England, wrote to his Sovereigns that "a person had come, 
like Columbus, to propose to the King of England an enterprise like that of 
the Indies." The Spanish King immediately instructed his minister that he 
should inform Henry VII that the prior claims of Spain and Portugal would be 
interfered with if he commissioned any such adventurer. But the warning 
came too late. 

It is possible that the unsuccessful mission of Bartholomew Columbus to 
England, while the future Admiral was besieging the Spanish Court, may have 
been the means of arousing in John Cabot's mind a desire to test the truth of 
the new theory of a westward path to the Indies. When the accomplished feat 
of the first voyage to the West Indies fired the imagination of Europe and 
became the chief topic of interest among the maritime nations, even cool- 
4 49 



So THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

blooded England was measurably excited, and her parsimonious King yielded 
to the urgent prayers of a Genoese navigator, and authorized John Cabot and his 
three sons " to sail to the East, West, or North, with five ships, carrying the 
English flag, to seek and discover all the islands, countries, regions, or provinces 
of pagans in whatever part of the world." We do not learn that this generous 
permission to sail and discover unknown countries was accompanied by anything 
more than a meagre provision for carrying it out, although the King in return 
for the commission given and the single vessel equipped was to have one-fifth 
of the profits of the voyage. According to at least one authority, Cabot had a 
little fleet of three or four vessels fitted out by private enterprise, "wheryn 
dyvers merchaunts as well of London as Bristowe aventured goodes and 
sleight merchaundise wh departed from the West cuntrey in the begynnyng 
of somer — ." We are only sure, however, of one vessel, the Matthews, which 
left Bristol in May of 1497. 

Choosing the most probable of several vague accounts of Cabot's course in 
starting out, we find the sturdy adventurer, with his son and eighteen followers, 
standing to the northward, after leaving the Irish coast, and then westerly into 
the unknown sea. The plan was that which Columbus followed, when he sailed 
from the Island of Ferro in the Canaries, of striking a certain parallel of latitude 
and sticking to it. The transatlantic liners of to-day call that "great-circle 
sailing." 

We have absolutely no record of the month or more spent upon the 
outward course. What strange experiences the Gulf Stream or the Labrador 
current presented to Cabot we can only surmise. There were no summer isles 
and turquoise seas for him. Instead of the song birds, the spicy breezes and 
silver sands that Columbus found, his less fortunate countryman came upon the 
forbidding coast of Labrador, bleak even in the summer time, where he saw no 
human beings. 

It was on the 24th of June, 1497, that those on board of the Matthews 
unexpectedly caught sight of that strange, unknown land. They had no more 
notion than had Columbus of the magnitude of the discovery. This was to their 
appreciation no new world, but rather the extreme coast of the kingdom of the 
Grand Khan — a remote and desolate shore of India. But their imagination 
peopled it with strange beings ; demons, griffins, and all the uncouth creatures 
of mediaeval mythology dwelt there with the bear and the walrus. If the South 
was the scene of brighter illusions, of kingdoms where the rulers lived in golden 
halls and fountains which could confer upon the bather the gift of perpetual 
youth, the glamour and legend which the cold crags of the North conjured up 
were not less characteristic. Haunted islands and capes, where the clamor of 
men's voices were heard at night, were known to all the sailors and pilots that 
followed after the Cabots. 



JOHN SEBASTIAN CABOT. 



51 



The land that John Cabot first reached, wherever it was, he called "Terra 
Firma." There he planted the royal standard of England, after which he seems 
to have sailed southward ; presumably to reverse the course by which he came 
over. Peter Martyr, in relating the wonders that Cabot discovered, recounts 
that "in the seas thereabouts he found so great multitudes of certain Bigge 
fishes much like unto Tunies (which the inhabitants called baccalaos) that they 
sometimes stayed hisshippes." 
Another writer stated that the 
" Beares also be as bold which 
will not spare at mid-day to 
take your fish before your 
face." Coasting probably for 
three hundred leagues, with 
the land to starboard, Cabot 
seems to have discovered New- 
foundland on the mainland side 
and to have passed through 
the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He 
named several islands and 
prominent points, but the 
names are uncertain and the 
localities problematical. We 
only know that in his opinion 
England would no longer have 
to go to Iceland for her fish, 
and that he relied upon his 
crew to corroborate his state- 
ments when he returned to 
England, because his unsup- 
ported word would not have 
established the fact of his dis- 
coveries. Royalty is not al- 
ways liberal, despite the phrase 
"a royal giver" ; for we learn 

right here of the munificence of the English King, who gave this intrepid sailor 
and discoverer ten pounds as a reward for his labor, and afterwards added a 
yearly pension of twenty pounds, or $100. There is something pathetic in this 
fragmentary story of the second continent-finder. The little spasm of approval 
and excitement which his success occasioned soon died away, and even at its 
height was utterly inadequate to the magnitude of his work. The simple sailor 
must have made as great a show as possible upon the stipend granted by the 




CABUT ON THE SHORE.-, OF EAKKADOK. 



52 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

king, for we read in a letter of the Venetian, Pasqualigo, that " he is dressed in 
silk and the English run after him like a madman." 

A second voyage of John and Sebastian Cabot to discover the island of 
Cipango, — that illusory land that Columbus had so hopefully sought, — was 
undertaken ; but a storm came up and one of the vessels was much damaged, 
finally seeking refuge in an Irish port. The others sailed into a fog of tradition 
and mystery as dense as that which wrapped the new-found land. We read 
that the expedition returned and that Sebastian Cabot lived to engage in further 
adventures, but of his father we know nothing further, the supposition being 
that he died upon this second expedition. Whether the third traditional voyage 
of Sebastian Cabot in the fifteenth century is fact or fable is not known. His 
subsequent career was mainly in the service of other sovereigns. 

The profits of the second voyage of the Cabots were so meagre as to fail 
to arouse any enthusiasm ; they were so small, in fact, that almost all interest 
died out in England. We read of one or two minor adventures, as those of 
Rut and Grube, the former of whom went to find the northern passage to 
Cathay, in which voyage his two ships encountered vast icebergs, by which one 
of them was lost and the other "durst go no further," and after visiting Cape 
Race returned to England. With these few exceptions England took no part 
in the great work of discovery, by which, little by little, with here an island 
and there a headland, now a river and then a bit of coast, the results of that 
great discovery were combined into that which came to be known, though not 
at first, as the New World. 

Yet Newfoundland was not deserted. Almost from the first the Breton 
and Basque fishermen, hardy and adventurous, frequented its shores. The Isle 
of Demons and other uncanny places in the new country were visited by 
fleets of French fishermen's boats, and plenteous cargoes of "Baccalois," or 
cod-fish, were taken eastward yearly for the Lenten market. 

AMERICUS VESPUCIUS AND HIS VOYAGES. 

The year 1500 was one of extreme importance in the making of New 
World history. The Spanish and Portuguese had already settled their dispute 
over the division of territory, the Pope's decision, to which all good Catholics 
in that day yielded unhesitating obedience, having given to Spain all land dis- 
covered west of a certain meridian line, and to Portugal whatever lay to the 
eastward. In this way Portugal acquired her right to the Brazils ; and she also 
laid claim to Newfoundland. But the great element, time, had just begun to 
work. It was destined, under the ordering of Providence, that Spain and 
Portugal should make conquests, but not hold them. The Anglo-Saxon was 
only then a potentiality; his greatness was becoming recognized: he was yet to 
sweep the Atlantic, and, finally, settling on the stormy coast to the west, was 



AMERICUS VESPUCIUS AND HIS VOYAGES. 53 

to lay the foundations of a great empire, which was to make it possible to tell 
the inspiring and unique Story of America. 

We now come to Americus Vespucius, who was, singularly enough, and 
through no scheming of his own, to give his name to a country that should 
rightly have 'borne the name Columbia. And he was to do this though he 
headed but one expedition. The story must necessarily be brief. 

Vespucius was a Florentine — another conspicuous illustration of the fact 
that he was to discover even as Columbus had discovered, but Italy was to reap 
no benefit. He was, indeed, to sow the seed, but the strong arms of others 
were to reap the harvest. On the 9th day of March, 1451, Vespucius was 
born, in the city of Florence. Of a noble but not at all wealthy family, he 
received a liberal education, devoting himself to astronomy and cosmography. 
The fortunes of business took him to Seville, where he became the agent of 
the powerful Medici family. It was in 1490 that he became acquainted with 
Columbus, and was concerned in fitting out four caravels for voyages of dis- 
covery ; he took an active part in assisting Columbus in preparing for his 
second voyage. Vespucius makes the statement, which we are prepared to 
accept, that in 1497 he sailed, and probably as astronomer, with one of the 
numerous expeditions that the success of Columbus had called into existence, 
leaving Cadiz on the 10th of May of that year. After twenty-seven days of 
sailing, the fleet, consisting of four vessels, reached "a coast which we thought 
to be that of a continent," traversing which they found themselves in "the 
finest harbor in the world." Just what that harbor is it is impossible to say. 
Some writers have placed it as far south as Campeachy Bay ; Chesapeake Bay 
has also been designated. Cape Charles being the point of entering. It is 
impossible, however, owing to Vespucius's loose manner of writing, to fix the 
place with any certainty. But he states that he doubled Cape Sable, the 
southernmost point on the peninsula of Florida. Vespucius tells us that 
while in "the finest harbor" mentioned the natives were very friendly, and 
implored the aid of the whites in an expedition against a fierce race of cannibals 
who had invaded at different times their coasts, carrying away human victims 
whom they sacrificed by the score. The island in question was one of the 
Bahamas, one hundred leagues away. The fleet accordingly bore away, the 
Spaniards being piloted by seven friendly Indians. The Spaniards arrived off 
an island called Iti, and landed. 

Here they encountered fierce cannibals, who fought bravely but unsuccess- 
fully against firearms. More than two hundred prisoners were made captive, 
seven of them being presented to the seven Indian guides. But nearly a year 
had passed since they had left Cadiz. The vessels were leaky ; it was time to 
return. Accordingly, leaving some point of the coast line of the United States, 
the fleet reached Cadiz on the 15th of October, 1498, with two hundred and 



HOW AMERICA CAME TO BE NAMED. 55 

twenty-two cannibal prisoners as slaves, where they were well received and 
sold their slaves for a good sum. 

Still following Vespucius's statement, on the 16th of May, 1499, he started 
on a second voyage in a fleet of three ships, under Alonzo de Ojeda. In this voy- 
age Ojeda reached the coast of Brazil, and being compelled to turn to the north 
because of the strong equatorial current, they went as far as Cayenne, thence to 
Para, Maracaibo, and Cape de la Vela. They also touched at Saint Domingo. 
The expedition returned to Cadiz on the 8th of September, 1500. Three 
months later Yanez Pinzon, taking a like course, discovered the greatest river 
on the earth, the Amazon, as will be seen a little further on in this chapter. 
Ojeda just missed that discovery. A year later, for some reason dissatisfied 
with his position — and Vespucius seems to have passed at pleasure from one 
command to another — he entered the service of Emanuel, King of Portugal, 
and took part in an expedition to the coast of Brazil. He wrote a careful 
account of this voyage, which he addressed to some member of the Medici 
family, to whom, in 1504, he sent a fuller narrative of his expedition, which 
was published at Strasbourg. This gave him high reputation as a navigator 
and original discoverer. 

Under the command of Coelho, a Portuguese navigator, on either May 
10th or June 10th, 1503, a little squadron, with Vespucius, left the Tagus to 
discover, if possible, Malacca somewhere on the South American coast ; but 
through mishap the fleet was separated, and Vespucius, with his own vessel, 
and later joined by another, proceeded to Bahia. Thence they sailed for 
Lisbon, arriving there, after about a year's absence, on the 18th of June, 1504. 

HOW AMERICA CAME TO BE NAMED. 

In a letter written from Lisbon, in 1 504, to Rene, Duke of Lorraine, Ves- 
pucius gives an account of four voyages to the Indies, and says that the first 
expedition in which he took part sailed from Cadiz May 20, 1497, and returned 
in October, 1498. This letter has provoked endless discussions among his- 
torians as to the first discovery of the mainland of America, and it has been 
charged against Vespucius that after his return from his first voyage to Brazil 
he prepared a chart, giving his own name to that part of the country. It is high 
time the name of Vespucius was rid of this stain. It seems to be established 
that at this time the Duke Rene, of Lorraine, a scholar, and one deeply inter- 
ested in the discoveries of the age, caused a map to be prepared for him by an 
energetic young student of geography, a young man named Waldsee-Muller, 
who innocently affixed the name America to the Brazil country. In this way the 
name became fixed, and was eventually taken up by others. It was not till 
nearly thirty years afterward — in 1535 — that the charge of discrediting Colum- 
bus by affixing his own name was brought, and most unjustly so, against Vespu- 



5 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

cius. Latter-day opinion acquits Vespucius of this charge, and now with the 
fact established, at this time of our Columbian anniversary, it should no more be 
brought against the distinguished navigator, whose discoveries were important, 
if he did not accomplish all that was expected, and that through no fault of his. 
Vespucius died in Seville, February 2, 1 5 1 2 — six years after his predecessor, 
the first Admiral, had passed away. 

YANEZ PINZON AS A VOYAGER. 

The first man of importance to sail after Ojeda and Vespucci was Vincent 
Yefiez Pinzon, who with his brother Ariez Pinzon, built four caravels, little deck- 
less or half-decked yachts, with which he sailed from Palos in the month of 
December, 1499. Going further south than his predecessors, Pinzon bore away 
toward the coast of Brazil, his first land being discovered at a point eight 
degrees north of the equator, near where the town of Pernambuco was afterwards 
built : he was the first Spaniard to cross the equinoctial line. We read that he 
lost sight of the pole-star, a circumstance which must have alarmed his sailors. 
More wonderful still, — most miraculous it must have seemed, — was the finding 
of a great flood of fresh water, at the Equator, out of sight of land, which 
induced the navigator to seek for a very large river, and he found it ! — for there 
was the mighty Amazon with its mouth a hundred miles wide and sending a 
great tide of . fresh water a hundred miles out to sea. At their first landing 
Pinzon's sailors cut the names of their ships and of their sovereign on the trees 
and the rocks, while he took possession of the land in behalf of Spain. Here 
Pinzon seized some thirty Indians as slaves. The mighty Amazon, with its 
hundred-mile wide mouth, filled the explorers with wonder, as well it might. 
But the capturing of the Indians had created difficulties which endangered 
the safety of the fleet, so that Pinzon deemed it prudent to shorten his stay. 
Accordingly he set sail, and skirting along the coast discovered the Orinoco 
River and Trinidad ; after which they stood across to Hispaniola. A hurricane 
overtaking the little fleet nearly put an end to Pinzon's adventure, but he finally 
escaped with the loss of two of his vessels. With the others he returned to 
Spain, only to find that Diego de Lepe had sailed after him and returned before 
him, with a report of the continuance of the South American continent far to 
the southward. 

Rightly Da Gama has no place here, save as a discoverer in times of 
discovery. A skilled Portuguese mariner, he coasted the* eastern shores of 
Africa and visited India. In a second voyage he became involved in hostilities 
with the towns of the Malabar coast. In 1499 he was made Admiral of the 
Indies. He died at Cochin, India, Christmas Day, 1524. 

In 1499, the same year that the Pinzons and Lepe sailed, Pedro Alvarez de 
Cabral was commissioned by the Portuguese King, Emanuel, to follow Vasco da 



PORTUGAL IN THE FIELD. 



57 



Gama's course and establish a trading station on the Malabar coast. Gomez, 
for some reason unknown, sailed by the way of the Cape Verde Islands, and 
taking from thence a much more westerly course than he intended, came, quite 
by accident, upon the Continent that Pinzon and Lepe had so lately left. 
Probably the real cause of Cabral's deflection from his original course was to 
avoid the calms of the Guinea shore. He had no sooner made the strange 
land than he resolved to cruise along it, and concluded that this wonderful 
coast was- a continent. Despatching a ship home to Portugal with the news — 
with Caspar de Lemos in com- 
mand — he pursued his voyage. 
When Pinzon returned, therefore, 
he not only found that Lepe had 
been there before, but ascertained 
that Portugal pressed its prior 
claim to the coast he had discov- 
ered, based on the Pope's edict as 
well as the voyage of Cabral. 
The King of Portugal, on receiv- 
ing Cabral's message, soon des- 
patched a fleet to discover new 
territory for his crown ; and 
Americus Vespucius, till then in 
the Spanish service, accepted his 
overtures and went with the ex- 
pedition. When Gaspar de 
Lemos started for Portugal with 
the news of the discovery of the 
southern continent, Cabral waited 
only a few days and then sailed 
southward. 

The result of this second part 
of his voyage was the discover}' 
of the Cape of Good Hope. There the fleet, heretofore so successful, was 
overtaken by a terrific storm, in the course of which four of his vessels went 
down, among them being one which was commanded by the navigator Bar- 
tholomew Diaz. The name which Cabral gave to this new country was Vera 
Cruz. The appellation by which it was afterwards known, of " Brazil " or "the 
Brazils," was taken from the dye wood found there ; an Arabic word being 
borrowed for the purpose. Columbus discovered the new world without 
knowing he had done so, although his work was in pursuance of carefully 
laid plans. Cabral however, like Vespucius off the North American coast, ' 




an the MSS, of Tedt 



58 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

was aware from the first that the land he accidentally discovered was the main- 
land of a great continent. 

After his adventure at the Cape of Good Hope Cabral went as far as 
Hindostan and returned with laden ships, in which were immense quantities of 
spices, jewels and rare merchandise. " Verily," said Vespucius, who met him in 
the Cape Verde Islands upon his return voyage, "God has prospered King 
Emanuel." The same year [1500] that the Pinzons and Cabral sailed from 
their respective countries, Portugal sent the brothers Gaspar aad Miguel 
Corterea.l on the first of a series of new expeditions to explore the Northwest. 
The papal line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese possessions was 
called Borgia's meridian, and the suspicion that Cabot's discoveries lay to the 
eastward of this was sufficient cause for an expedition from Lisbon. These were 
unfortunate voyages, for although the region already explored by the Cabots 
was revisited and the flag of Portugal planted in the chill domain of the griffins 
and demons of Breton fancy, yet the wild men and curiosities which they brought 
home were but a sorry exchange for the lives that they cost. From Gaspar 
Cortereal's second voyage he never returned. Two of his ships came home, 
and when his brother Miguel went in search of him his flag-ship also was lost, 
with all on board. 

OTHER DISCOVERERS. 

Rodigero de Bastidas and John de la Cosa, sailing with two ships from 
Cadiz, in 1502, discovered the Gulf of Darien, which point Ojeda on his 
second voyage also touched, thence proceeding to the West Indies. Following 
these, after a number of smaller adventurers that tried their fortune upon 
the Atlantic, Juan de Solis and Vincent Yanez Pinzon sailed from the Port 
of Saville, six years later. They directed their two caravels toward the 
coast of Brazil, going to the thirty-fifth degree south latitude, where they 
discovered the Rio de la Plata, — the River of Silver, — which they at first 
called Paranaguaza. To them also is due the credit for the discovery of 
Yucatan, on this same voyage. De Solis was by some considered the very 
ablest navigator of his time, and his fame at last induced the King of Spain to 
appoint him to the command of two ships fitted out to discover a passage to the 
Spice Islands, or Moluccas, for which he sailed in October, five years after he 
and Pinzon had made the trip just alluded to. He returned to the la Plata 
River, which stream he entered in January, 15 16, but a tragic fate awaited him. 
Attempting to ascend the river and explore its banks, de Solis and a number of 
his crew were surprised and overpowered by the savages, who with barbaric 
heartlessness roasted and ate the unfortunate Spaniards in the sight of their 
companions on the vessels. The survivors, sickened and terrified by such a 
spectacle, lost no time in escaping from the land of these cannibals. They 
stopped only at Cape San Augustin, where they loaded their vessels with Brazil 



PONCE DE LEON DISCOVERS FLORIDA. 59 

wood, and made the best of their way back to Europe with the sad news. 
In the following year Charles V sent Cordova, with a command of 1 10 men 
in three caravels, into that distant but no longer dreaded West, which still had 
its rewards for the adventurer. 

Upon the shore of Yucatan, where he first landed, at Cape Catoche, the 
Spaniards saw with surprise' people who in one respect differed very greatly 
from the natives who had so far been met with in the western voyages, inasmuch 
as they dressed in cotton and other fabrics, instead of going naked and painting 
their bodies. Not only in their dress but in their houses they exhibited signs 
of civilization that excited the wonder of Cordova and his men. 

PONCE DE LEON DISCOVERS FLORIDA. 

Six years had passed after the death of Columbus, when, in 15 12, Juan 
Ponce de Leon sailed from Puerto Rico in a northerly direction and discovered 
the peninsula which the Admiral had so nearly found upon his first voyage. 
De Leon first sighted land at about the boundary line separating Florida from 
Georgia. Landing, he took possession in the name of his sovereign, calling 
the new country Florida ; for it was in April, when the Cherokee roses, the wild 
jessamine, and all the multitudinous blossoms of a Floridian spring-time were 
filling the air with their fragrance. The discoverer of this paradise returned to 
Spain, and, obtaining the governorship of the new coast, undertook to enter 
upon its possession. But the savages were otherwise minded. The followers 
of Ponce de Leon were hunted through the tangled growth of the luxuriant 
forests or harassed in their defences behind the sand-dunes, till many of them 
had been killed, and their leader was glad to escape with the little remnant of 
his force. So he re-embarked, abandoning the country ; but the Spaniards 
claimed Florida from that day, in spite of a counter-claim which England 
presented in virtue of the discoveries of the Cabots. 

Later, in 1527, Pamphilo de Narvaes repeated Ponce de Leon's experiment, 
with a similar result. Then Ferdinand de Soto, who had been Governor of 
Cuba, obtained the title of Marquis of Florida, and, with nearly a thousand 
men and ten ships, he landed, in 1539, on the west coast of the peninsula. 
Five years later a little handful of broken, impoverished, beaten, disheartened 
Spaniards, less than a third of the number that had sailed so proudly to the 
conquest of Florida, left its shores to the sole occupancy of the jealous natives 
who inhabited it. There was no perpetual "fountain of youth" there for 
de Soto, but ageing, weariness, and disaster instead. 

When Charles V, of Spain, was beginning to feel the benefit of the con- 
quest in the New World, and Cortez and the Spanish captains and adventurers 
were planting the standard of Spain in rich territory, Francis the First, of France, 
chafed at the necessity of acknowledging the success of his rival. Francis was 



60 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

one of the most curious characters of European history, a combination of good 
and evil traits. Vanity, culture, sensibility to the influences of art and literature, 
hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness distinguished him. He was the friend of 
philosophers and of those who were far from being philosophers. 

From Florence came Verazzano, a navigator of repute who, unlike most of 
the new world-finders, was by birth a gentleman, descended from men who had 
been prominent in Florentine history. He was appointed to sail westward from 
Dieppe with four ships, in the year 1523, to seek a new passage to that Cathay 
which still lured the hopes of Christendom ; and in passing we may remark 
upon the curious irony of fortune which permitted Italy to lend to other nations 
the men who should win the greenest laurels as discoverers, when she herself 
was unable to claim a foot of territory in the new world. The beginning of 
Verazzano's voyage was puzzling enough. He had not proceeded far from 
Dieppe when a storm overtook him and he escaped with two of his vessels to 
Brittany ; thence he cruised against the Spaniards and finally, having but one 
vessel left out of the four with which he started, he set sail for the island of 
Madeira, and on the 17th of January, 1524, turned the prow of his caravel, the 
Dolphin, westward, to cross the Atlantic. After a passage of forty-five days, 
during which the strange experiences common to such an adventure were not 
lacking, he sighted a low shore where vast forests of pine and cypress rose from 
the sandy soil. This was not far from the present site of Wilmington, North 
Carolina. Among other things the Florentine noticed the presence of many 
fragrant plants " which yeeld most sweete savours farr from the shore." The 
savages who appeared on shore attracted the greatest attention from the voy- 
agers since they were not at all sure what their reception might be when they 
landed for the supply of water of which they stood in need. A boat approached 
as near as possible to the beach, when one of the sailors, taking some gifts as a 
propitiatory offering, jumped overboard and swam through the surf. But as he 
neared the beach and saw the throng of screeching red men who awaited him 
his courage failed, and flinging his presents among them he endeavored to 
return ; but the savages succeeded in capturing him and returned to the sand, 
where in the sight of the terrified captive they built a great fire. Instead, how- 
ever, of cooking him, as he expected, they warmed and dried him, showed him 
every mark of affection, and then led him to the shore and let him go. At the 
next place they touched, the crew of the Dolphin showed their appreciation 
of the courtesy of the Indians by stealing one of their children. 

From the Carolinas Verazzano's course was northward along the coast, 
his first anchorage being in the bay of New York. Into that beautiful harbor, 
through the Narrows and under the green and tree-covered banks of Staten 
Island, he rowed, being met by numerous canoes filled with Indians who came 
out to welcome him. From New York the Dolphin followed the Long Island 



THE FRENCH VISIT NEW ENGLAND. 61 

coast as far as Block Island, and from there to the harbor of Newport, where for 
fifteen days they rested, being entertained by two savage chiefs, who did all that 
lay in their power to dazzle the eyes of their white visitors with the signs of opu- 
lence, as evidenced by copper bracelets, wampum belts, the skins of wild 
beasts, etc. 

From here the little vessel steered along the New England coast, neither offi- 
cers nor seamen finding much to attract them. The Indians were suspicious and 
inhospitable, driving them back with shouts and showers of arrows when they 
ventured ashore in their boats. The seaboard of Maine was visited, and then 
the banks of Newfoundland, from which last point Verazzano, whose expedition 
was for us, perhaps, the most significant of all, sailed back for France, having 
explored the American coast from Hatteras to Newfoundland. 

In the following year Verazzano sailed again from France with a fleet, but 
no news of that expedition ever came back, and the mystery of its loss chilled 
the ardor for discovery in that country, so that for several years we hear of no 
further adventures to the new world. But in 1534 the persuasions of Admiral 
Chabot led to the issuing of a commission to Jacques Carder, of St. Malo, who 
sailed from that port in the same year with two ships and one hundred and 
twenty-two men. He circumnavigated Newfoundland and explored the Gulf 
of St. Lawrence, and upon a second voyage sailed up the river of the same 
name for three hundred leagues, as far as the "great and swift Fall." On the 
site of Montreal he visited an Indian town. Having attempted the settlement 
for which he had been sent out, Carder went back to France only to return with 
a larger expedition to Canada five years later. 

Haifa century of discovery and adventure had elapsed. The map-makers 
of Europe during that time were kept busy by the changes made necessary 
from fresh data requiring the 'readjustment of old lines. From Columbus to 
Verazzano and Cartier, the whole coast, with a few exceptions, had been discov- 
ered, from the stony crags of Labrador to the Cape of Good Hope. It only 
remained now for the round-up of this magnificent hunt, which was accom- 
plished by the intrepid Magellan, prince of navigators, who, first turning west- 
wardly across the Pacific found the true path to far-off Cathay, which the mighty 
Genoese had sought so patiently, so grandly, so mistakenly, among the isles of 
June and the pearl banks of the Caribbean Sea. 

More than ordinary romance and interest attend the story of Vasco Nunez 
de Balboa. His appearance in the story of Spanish conquest in America, if 
not dignified, is captivating to the imagination. Martin Fernandez de Enciso, 
the geographer, sailed from St. Domingo to go to the relief of the explorer, 
Ojeda, who was dying of famine at San Sebastian. Among the stores in his 
vessel was a cask which contained something more valuable than the bread 
which it was invoiced as containing. When Enciso's ships had got fairly out 



62 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to sea, Balboa crept out of his cask and presented himself to the commander, 
who could, after all, do nothing but scold, as it was then too late to return the 
fugitive to the creditors from whom he had taken that means of escaping. 




FERDINAND CnRTEZ. 
r possession ./ the Marquis de Salmi 



There were some threats of putting the culprit ashore on a small desert island, 
but that was not done, or one of the most popular stories of the New World 
would have been unwritten. 



THE STORY OE BALBOA. 63 

But by the time the expedition in search of Ojeda had been abandoned 
and the followers of Enciso, reinforced by the haggard remnant of Ojeda's 
force, had reached the Gulf of Uraba, Balboa was no inconsiderable figure in 
that company. 

When the building of Santa Maria del Darien had commenced and 
Enciso's temper provoked an insurrection, the stowaway, Balboa, was spoken 
of as his successor. The new-comers had encroached on the province of 
Nicuesa, who had been given a province in Darien, of which he was Governor, 
at the same time that Ojeda was similarly favored by King Ferdinand. Some 
of them, therefore, were for giving their allegiance to that Governor. The 
matter was settled by giving Balboa charge till Nicuesa should come. 

Nicuesa, embittered by famine and all manner of hardship, was rejected by 
the men of Darien when he finally came to them, and, turning his poor little 
brigantine seaward, was never heard from again. The cruelty shown to him at 
this time was afterward charged upon Balboa, but he was cleared by the court. 
He, however, showed little kindness to the irate Enciso, who went home to 
Spain an avowed enemy, complaining bitterly of the treatment he had received 
at the hands of the stowaway, whom, doubtless, he regretted not having 
"marooned," i. e., cast on a desert island, when he had the chance. 

Balboa next explored Darien. He married a native princess, thus making 
the old chief Comogre, her father, his firm friend. The first evidence which the 
Spaniards had of the superior claims of the people of Central America to civil- 
ization, was at Comogre's house, where "finely wrought floors and ceilings," a 
chapel occupied by ancestral mummies, and other signs of ease and leisure, 
appeared. But dearer than anything else was the sight of ornaments and flakes 
of virgin gold. This the Spaniards, with their usual propensity, acquired, and 
marveled at the strange tales which were told them of a land further to the west- 
ward where the people made bowls and cups of the yellow metal. This was 
the first news they had received of the kingdom of Peru. Balboa sent the 
whole of the story and a fifth of the gold to Spain as Ferdinand's share, but the 
ship went down on the voyage. Its arrival at Court would have done more 
than anything else to check the legal proceedings which were being commenced 
against him at home. However, Balboa was appointed Captain-General of 
Darien, by the Government of Hispaniola, which was some little comfort to 
him. 

Balboa next advanced across the Isthmus to find "the great sea" of which 
he had heard. On the twenty-fifth of September, in 15 13, after some trouble 
with the Indians, Vasco Nunez de Balboa stood where the poet Keats has 
made Cortez stand for some years past, on a peak in Darien, a mountain in the 
country of Ouarequa, and looked with the glad eyes of a discoverer on the blue 
waters of the mighty Pacific Ocean, that till then had had no herald in the 



6 4 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Eastern world. Having shortly after this gained 
returned to Darien with the 
news of his great discovery, 
which might have gained him 
the gratitude and reward it mer- 
ited had not Pedrarias Davila 
succeeded in gaining the royal 
ear, and with a band of cava- 
liers, lured to new fields by the 
golden rumors of Peru, started 
for Darien. By his commission 
Davila was Admiral and Gov- 



the Pacific coast, Balboa 




ernor ; he was a leading 
figure on the Isthmus for 
sixteen years, and during 
that time committed so 
many crimes that the his- 
torian Oviedo computes 
that he would have to 
face two million souls at 
the judgment day ! Oviedo, like the humane Las Casas, believed that the 
Indians possessed souls ; and though we know how given the Spanish chronic- 



BALBOA DISCOVERS rill- PACIFIC. 



DISCOVERY OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN. 65 

lers were to exaggeration and even downright mendacity, still we cannot doubt 




BALBOA TAKES POSSESSION OF THE PACIFIC, IN THE NAME OF HIS SOVEREIGNS. 

that enough murders were committed during the governorship of Davila to 
make even the conscience of a Spaniard feel uncomfortable. With the cava- 

5 



66 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

liers who came over with Davila were Oviedo, the historian already named, and 
Enciso, Balboa's old commander. The first thing that the jealous Davila did 
was to arrest Balboa on trumped-up charges, but they did not suffice to insure 
his conviction, and about this time the news of his great discoveries was 
beginning to turn the tide in Spain in his favor. It is to be said to Balboa's 
credit that he was very politic in his treatment of the Indians, using kindness 
where the new Governor practiced the utmost cruelty. As a result Balboa 
was regarded with friendly feelings and his rival hated, — a condition of affairs 
that could not fail to engender jealousy and danger. 

The Spanish bishop, who had come with the expedition, strove to patch up 
matters by suggesting a betrothal between Balboa and the daughter of the 
Governor. As the daughter was in Spain, and the alliance could not be con- 
summated for some time, Balboa consented, though we have no evidence that 
he really contemplated abandoning his beloved Indian wife. The proposed 
marriage was but one article in an important treaty, without which the younger 
man would have been crushed by the elder. 

Before long, however, Balboa again incurred the hatred of his enemy, and 
accepting a treacherous invitation to visit him, was arrested by his old comrade, 
Pizarro, and beheaded, at the age of forty-two, in the land with which his name and 
fame are indissolubly connected. It was just before his last quarrel with Davila, 
which resulted in his untimely end, that' Balboa performed one of the most 
astonishing feats in Spanish-American annals : having taken his ships apart, 
he transported them across the Sierras, and launched them on the Pacific. 

Ferdinand de Soto was born in Xeres. Spain, in 1 500. We first meet with 
him, so far as American exploration is concerned, on accompanying his friend 
and patron Davila [previously referred to in the account of Balboa], on his 
expedition to Darien, of which Davila was governor, and whose offensive 
administration De Soto was the first to resist. He supported Hernandez in 
Nicaragua in 1527. who perished by the hand of Davila for not obeying his 
instructions. Withdrawing from the service of Davila, in 1528 he explored the 
coasts of Guatemala and Yucatan for 700 miles, in search of the strait which was 
supposed to connect the two oceans. In 1532, by special request of Pizarro. 
he joined him in his enterprise of conquering Peru. He was present at the 
seizure of the Peruvian Inca, and took part in the massacre which followed, 
serving the usual apprenticeship in butchery which hardened the hearts and made 
callous the nerves of those who followed the Sanish conquerors : but we are told 
he condemned the murder of the Inca Alahualpa, as well he might ! — Prescott has 
pictured the infamy of this crime in indelible colors. 

In 1537, De Soto was appointed Governor of Cuba, and two years later 
he crossed the Gulf of Mexico to attempt the conquest of Florida at his own 
expense, believing it to be the richest province yet discovered. Anchoring in 



FERDINAND DE SOTO. 



67 



Tampa Bay, May 25th, 1539, his route was through a country made hostile by 
the violence of the Spanish invader, Navarez. It was fighting- all the time, but 
it was not conquest. He continued to march northward, reaching, October 
iSth, 1540, the present site of Mobile, Alabama, and finally arriving at the 
mouth of the Savannah river. That country was then, as it is now, flat and 
sandy, its low forests of pine interspersed with cyprus swamps and knolls where 
the live-oaks flourished. Frequent streams intersect portions of it. Traveling 

with such means as De Soto had at his 
disposal was very slow and trouble- 
some. From the Savannah he turned 
nland, fighting the Indians at almost 
ivery step, and overcoming mighty 




obstacles. With nearly a third of 
his men slain or lost, after a winter 
spent on the Yazoo, and disap- 
pointment following disappointment as he searched in vain, in his westward 
course, for the cities of gold which he saw in glowing but illusory vision, after 
a year and a half of unparalleled hardships and constant marching, in April. 
1542, he discovered the Mississippi, that mighty stream whose current flows for 
four thousand miles, upon which the eyes of a white man had never before 
rested. This he explored for a short distance above and below Chickasaw 
Bluffs. Here his oreat career ended, for he died of malignant fever. To 



68 



THE STORY OF AMERICA, 



conceal his death from the Indians, his body was wrapped in a mantle, and 
in the stillness of midnight was silently sunk in the middle of the stream. His 
soldiers pronounced his eulogy by grieving for their loss, while the priests 
chanted the first requiem ever heard on the waters of the Mississippi. 




THE bANKs UK THL MlablsslI'I'I TO-DAY. 




ClLLi GATES AT ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA. 



CHAPTER III. 




SETTLING THE NEW COUNTRY. 

FEW years cover the beginnings of westward migration from 
Europe and the British Isles. Great impulses seem to be 
epidemic. The variety of causes which led to the planting of 
the American colonies became operative under diverse national 
and race conditions, so that they appear in history as the 
synchronous details of a common plan. As the reader follows 
these pages and appropriates all the wonderful and inspiring 
details of this unequaled record of four centuries, his interest 
will deepen and his amazement will keep pace with his interest, binding a 
barren shore, broken only by the roar of the surf, the cries of birds and animals, 
and the whoop of the Indian, he will lay down the volume, having discovered 
that civilization has followed the sun until the two oceans have met — connected 
by an unbroken tide of humanity ebbing and flowing from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific ; and westward the Star of Empire still takes its way ! 

A minute account of the social and political situations in the various 
kingdoms of Europe during the sixteenth century is not within the scope of 
this work, but it will be well to make a very brief statement of the questions 
that agitated Christendom at this time, and to notice the temper of the times. 

Cupidity and a love of adventure led the Spaniard to the conquest of the 
New World. Spain was then paramount in Europe, most powerful as well as 
most Catholic ; and the controlling motive of her sovereigns was conquest. 
It was not reformation nor revolution that sent her people over seas, but 

69 



7 o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the love of power and wealth. In France, on the contrary, the spirit of 
revolt against established dogmas had led to persecution, so that the Hugue- 
nots were glad to find an asylum in the wilderness of the New World. 
Under these conditions the first colonies were attempted in the middle of 
the sixteenth century. Thirty years later a second planting, more general and 
more effectual, was begun. 

At that time Protestant England had a Catholic king. Henry of Navarre 
was upon the throne of France, which he had gained by his apostacy. Holland, 
the mighty little republic, was, under the wise leadership of John of Barne- 
veld and the States General, keeping Catholic Europe in check. Spain 
had been for years planning the conquest of England "as a stepping- 
stone to the recovery of the Netherlands." It will be seen that the very 
causes which led emigrants to colonize the new continent forbade friendship 
or common interests between those of different races, the animosities of the 
Old World being very carefully transplanted to the new along with other 
possessions. 

France made the first attempt at colonization in 1555. One of the leaders 
in the enterprise was Coligny, the Huguenot admiral ; John Ribault and 
Laudoniere were masters of successive expeditions, seeking first the Florida 
coast and afterward establishing a settlement in Carolina. The French have 
seldom made good colonists, and those of Carolina were no exception to the 
general rule. It is probable that their quarrelsome dispositions would have 
destroyed them in time had not the Spanish claimants of the country, led by 
Menendez, hastened the event. This expedition of the Spaniards was not 
only noteworthy because of the cruel massacre of Ribault and his Huguenot 
followers, but also as the occasion of the founding of the most ancient of 
North American cities, St. Augustine. This occurred in 1564. 

The settlement of St. Augustine was followed by a hiatus in which nothing 
was done toward the colonization of America. This was due to the great 
religious war which was then raging in Europe. But in the interval the mis- 
sionary expeditions of the Spanish Franciscans, Ruyz and Espejio, in 1582, 
resulted in the building of Santa Fe in New Mexico. There had also been the 
establishment by adventurers of various fishing and trading stations, notably 
the one on the island of New Foundland. 

During the interval England had been steadily growing as a marine power, 
and her navigators had directed men's eyes anew towards the land where so 
many of their countrymen should find refuge. Finally Raleigh, following in 
the footsteps of his famous half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, obtained a 
patent from Queen Elizabeth, by the terms of which he should become pro- 
prietor of six hundred miles radially from any point which he might discover 
or take, provided he did not encroach upon territory otherwise granted by any 




AN INDIAN ATTACK ON ISROOKFIELD. 
71 



7 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Christian sovereign. As an auxiliary to this grant the queen gave her favorite 
a monopoly of the sale of sweet wines, by the profits of which business he was 
soon enabled to fit out what was known as the Lane expedition, that sailed 
under the command of Grenville in 1585, and landed at Roanoke, in Virginia. 



THE ROANOKE COLONY. 

Grenville's first act upon landing was to rouse the animosity of the Indians 
by burning one of their villages and some cornfields, after which he left Lane, 
the Governor, with only an hundred and ten men and returned to England. 
Scarcity of provisions, a constant quarrel with their Indian neighbors, and a 

general feeling of discouragement 
led these first Virginia colonists to 
hail the navigator, Drake, who ap- 
peared on the coast a few months 
after, as a deliverer, and rejecting 
his offers of a vessel and provi- 
sions, they insisted upon returning 
with him to the mother country. 
Their departure was almost imme- 
diately followed by the arrival of 
reinforcements and supplies from 
Raleigh, brought by Grenville, who, 
when he found the place deserted, 
left fifteen men to guard it and 
himself proceeded southward to 
pillage the Spaniards of the West 
Indies. 

A second expedition, dis- 
patched by Raleigh, included many 
women, that families might be 
formed on the new soil and the colonists be satisfied to remain. This enter- 
prise was led by John White and eleven others, having a company charter. 
Upon arrival in Virginia White found only a skeleton to show where the 
former settlement had been. Indian treachery was assigned as the reason ior 
its disappearance. Actuated probably by a nervous anxiety, White massacred 
some friendly Indians, under the impression that they were hostiles, and in 
August of 1587 returned to England for supplies, leaving behind him eighty- 
nine men, seventeen women, and eleven children, the youngest being his 
own granddaughter, Virginia Dare, the first white child born in America. 

... 

White arrived in England to find the nation preparing for a struggle with 
Spain. His return to the colonies was therefore delayed. Raleigh, finding 




SEL) WITH PAUSADES. 

Museum, made ly John 



THE FRENCH ATTEMPT COLONIZATION. 71 

himself impoverished by the former expeditions, which had cost him $200,000, 
made an assignment, under his patent, to a company which included White and 
one Thomas Smith. A new fleet was procured, though with considerable 
trouble, and again the adventurers sought the Virginia coast, in 1590, only to 
rind that the unfortunate settlement of three years before had been utterly wiped 
out of existence. So ended the first English attempt to settle America. 

THE FRENCH ATTEMPT COLONIZATION. 

About the same time de La Roche, a Marquis of Brittany, obtained from 
Henry IV of France a commission to take Canada. His company consisted 
largely of convicts and criminals. Following him came Chauvin de Chatte, but 
he accomplished little of permanent value. 

For some years following the last attempt of Raleigh to colonize Virginia, 
a desultory trade with the Indians of the coast was pursued, the staples being 
sassafras, tobacco, and furs. Richard Hakluyt, one of the assignees of Raleigh, 
was most active in promoting this traffic ; and among others employed was 
Bartholomew Gosnold, who, taking a more northerly course than the one 
usually followed, discovered Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard, 
and the Elizabeth Islands. Following Gosnold, in 1603, came Martin Bring, 
exploring Fenobscot Bay, tracing the coast thence as far south as Martha's 
Vineyard. 

A French grant of the same year gave to Sieur de Monts, a Frotestant, the 
whole of North America between the 40th and 46th parallels of north latitude. 
This domain was named Acadie. De Monts looked for a monopoly of the fur 
trade on what is now the New England and Canadian coast. His Lieutenants in 
the expeditions which he soon commenced, were Boutrincourt and Champlain, 
of whom the latter became famous for several discoveries, but in particular for 
the lake which bears his name. 

So it will be noticed that both the French and English were stretching out 
their hands to acquire the same territory. De Monts and Champlain settled 
their colony at St. Croix, but soon shifted, trying various points along the coast, 
and even attempted to inhabit Cape Cod, but were driven away by the savages. 
At last they transferred the settlement to Fort Royal (Annapolis), where it 
endured for about a year. De Monts' commission or patent was recalled in 
1606, and but a little while previously Raleigh's grant was forfeited by 
attainder, he having been imprisoned by King James on a charge of 
treason. 

The frequent failures to effect a permanent settlement in America did not 
discourage adventurers, whose desire to possess the new world seemed to grow 
stronger every year. Soon two new companies were incorporated under Royal 
charter, to be known as the First and Second Colonies of Virginia. The 



74 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

former was composed of London men, and the latter of Plymouth people 
principally. 

The charter authorized the Companies to recruit and ship colonists, to 
engage in mining operations and the like, and to trade ; their exports to be free 
of duties for seven years and duties to be levied by themselves for their own 
use for a period of twenty years. They might also coin money and protect 
themselves against invasion. Their lands were held of the King. 

HARD TIMES COME AGAIN. 

Hardly had the charter been granted when James began to make regu- 
lations or instructions for the government of the colonies, which gave a shadow of 
self rule, established the church of England, and decreed, among other things, 
that the fruits of their industries were to be held in common stock by the colo- 
nists for five years. 

These instructions, along with the names of the "Council" appointed by 
James for the government of the settlement, were carried, sealed in a tin box, by 
Captain Christopher Newport, who commanded the three vessels which con- 
stituted the initial venture of the London Company. An ill chosen band 
landed at last at Old Point Comfort, after a stormy voyage. Of the one hundred 
and five men there were forty-three "gentlemen ", twelve laborers, half a dozen 
mechanics and a number of soldiers. These quarreled during the voyage, so 
that John Smith, who it afterward appeared was one of the Councillors 
appointed by the Crown, entered Chesapeake Bay a prisoner, charged with con- 
spiracy. As might have been expected, this company did not fare well. They 
were consumed with laziness and jealousy ; there were cabals in the council and 
bickerings outside of it. Repeatedly the men tried to desert ; deaths were fre- 
quent and want stared them in the face. During this time it is hardly too 
much to say that the energy and wisdom of John Smith held the discouraged 
adventurers together. New arrivals of the same sort as the first added to, 
rather than diminished, the difficulties of the situation, so that at length Smith 
wrote that thirty workmen would be worth more than a thousand of such people 
as were being sent out. Not till the third lot of emigrants arrived did any 
women visit the new settlement, and then only two. The Indians became more 
and more troublesome, and the London Company, dissatisfied at receiving no 
returns from their investment, threatened to leave the settlers to shift for 
themselves. 

In 1609 the London Company succeeded in obtaining a new charter, by the 
terms of which it organized as a stock company, with officers chosen for life, 
a governor appointed by the Company's Council in England, and a territory 
extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a strip four hundred miles in width. 

Durine the interval between the erantine of the charter and the organization 



POCAHOXTAS. 



75 



of the new government anarchy reigned in Virginia. Smith did everything 

possible to restore order, but was at last wounded by an accidental explosion 

of powder and forced to return to England. At this time Jamestown, which was 

the name of the settlement, contained 

five hundred men, sixty dwellings, a fort, 

store and church. The people possessed 

a little live stock and about thirty acres 

of cultivated land, but as this was all • ? 




AN INDIAN COUNCIL OF WAR. 



inadequate to their support 

there followed what is known 

in the annals of the colony 

as the " Starving time." 

These earlier days in Virginia, while historically valuable only as a warning, 

have afforded an unusual share of romance, much of which centres about the 

unromantic name of Smith. The historian gladly concedes to this remarkable. 

man his full share of credit for the survival of one of the most ill assorted 



76 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

parties that ever attempted to settle a new land. But, added to what is known 
of Smith's .adventures, struggles and escapes, is a great deal that rests solely 
upon his own authority, and much of this is probably apocryphal. One hesitates, 
for instance, to examine the Pocahontas legend too closely. There is no doubt 
of the existence of that aboriginal princess, of her marriage to the Englishman, 
Rolfe, of her enthusiastic reception by English society, or of the fact that some 
of her proud descendants live to-day in Virginia. But the pretty story of her 
devotion in saving the life of John Smith by protecting him with her own person 
when the club of the executioner was raised by chief Powhatan's order may be 
questioned. The account was not given in Smith's first narratives, and was 
subsequently written by him several years after the death of the lady in 
question. The multitude of hairbreadth escapes and marvelous adventures of 
which Smith made himself the centre, have laid him open to the suspicion of 
drawing a longer bow than Powhatan himself. 

JOHN SMITH. 

Clearing away the romance, and allowing all that is necessary to one who is 
so often the hero of his own narrative, it may not be uninteresting to briefly note 
some of the unquestioned services that John Smith performed for the struggling 
colony. We have seen how he arrived under suspicion and arrest, landing on 
the site of the little settlement which was destined to owe so much to him, like 
a felon. The opening of the hitherto secret instructions given under the broad 
seal of England, disclosed the fact that he was one of the Councillors named in 
that document. But it was his own clear head and strong courage rather than 
any royal appointment which won him the leadership in the affairs of the settle- 
ment. The quarrels and incompetency of the two governors, Wingfield and 
Ratcliffe, acted as a foil to display his superior quality. Although believing to 
the full in the common creed of his time, that the inducements of wealth were 
the only ones which would lead men to sacrifice home and comfort for the 
wilderness, yet he evinced a genius for hard work and a contempt for hard 
knocks worthy of a nobler purpose. 

It was in his first extended exploration of the Chickahominy that the Poca- 
hontas affair is supposed to have occurred. That he was taken prisoner then, 
and by some means escaped from his captors, is undeniable. And in passing, 
we may observe the curious misapprehension regarding the width of the Amer- 
ican continent which Smith's journey up the Chickahominy betrayed. He was 
actually looking for the Pacific ocean ! In keeping with this error is that clause 
in the American charters which would make the land grants like long, narrow 
ribbons reaching from ocean to ocean. 

In 1608 Smith ascended Chesapeake Bay and explored the larger rivers 
emptying into it. In an open boat, he traveled over two thousand miles on fresh 




BACON DEMANDING HIS COMMISSION OF GOVERNOR BERKELEY. 
77 



78 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

water. He parleyed with the Mohawks, and returned to subdue the much more 
unmanageable colonists at Jamestown. When the half-starved and wholly 
discouraged adventurers became mutinous, his methods of dealing with them 
were dictatorial and effectual. 

As already stated, Smith, upon his departure from Virginia, left nearly five 
hundred people there. In six months there remained only sixty. Many had 
died, some thirty or more seized a small vessel and sailed South on a piratical 
expedition, and a number wandered into the Indian country and never came 
back. Sick and disheartened, the remainder resolved to abandon Virginia and 
seek Newfoundland. Indeed, they had actually made all preparations and were 
starting upon their voyage, when they were met by the new governor from 
England, Lord De La War, with ships, recruits and provisions. 

The charter under which De La War assumed the government of Virginia 
was sufficiently liberal. It was that granted to Raleigh. But in the years that 
followed, the colony began to be prosperous and to excite the jealousy of the 
king — the same base, faithless king that had beheaded Raleigh. James began 
to conspire against the Virginia charter. It was too liberal : he dreaded the 
power it conferred. By 1 620 colonists were pouring into Jamestown at the rate 
of a thousand a year, and thence being distributed through the country. 

To try to condense the early colonial history of Virginia to the limits of our 
space would result in a bare recital of names, or a repetition of the narrative of 
ignorance, vice, and want, occasionally relieved by some deed of devotion or 
daring. At first, in spite of the liberal provisions of the charter, the conditions 
were, to a large extent, those of vassalage. In 1623 James ordered the Com- 
pany's directors to surrender their charter, a demand which they naturally 
refused. He then brought suit against the Company, seized their papers so 
that they should have no defence, and finally, through foul means obtained a 
decision dissolving the Company. After that the government of the colony 
consisted in a governor and two councils, one of which sat in Virginia and the 
other in London. The governor and councils were by royal appointment. 

bacon's rebellion. 
Here we must be allowed to digress a little, to give the part played by one 
Nathaniel Bacon in the affairs of Virginia. It was the year 1676, when Bacon 
became the leader of a popular movement instituted by the people of Kent 
County, whose purpose was twofold — first, to protect themselves against the 
Indians, which the Government failed to do ; and, secondly, to resist the unjust 
taxes and the oppressive laws enacted by the existing legislative assembly, and 
also to recover their liberties lost under the arbitrary proceedings of Sir William 
Berkeley, then Governor. Bacon, a popular, quiet man, who had come over 
fmm England a year before, was selected as their leader by the people, who, 



GO VERNOR BERKELE \ ' REMC 1 1 ED. 



79 



enrolling themselves 300 strong, were led by Bacon against the Indians. Bacon's 
success increased the jealousy of Sir William, who, because of Bacon's irregular 
leadership, — he having no proper commission, — proclaimed Bacon a rebel. 
Finally, the people rose en masse, and demanded the dissolution of the old 
assembly, whose acts had caused so much trouble. Berkeley was forced to yield, 
and a new assembly was elected, who, 
condoning Bacon's irregular leader- 
ship, promised him a regular com- 
mission as General. This commission 
Berkeley refused to issue, whereupon 
Bacon, assembling his forces, at the 
head ot 500 men, appeared before 




Berkeley and demanded his commission, 
which Berkeley, who was a real coward, 
made haste to grant. But, as if repenting 
of his concession, Berkeley determined to 
oppose Bacon by force. In this he was 
amestown. unsuccessful, and in July of that year, 

Bacon entered Jamestown, the Capital, and 
A little later, in October, Bacon died, and with him the 
"rebellion," or "popular uprising" as it had been variously called, subsided. 
Shortly afterward Berkeley was removed, for oppression and cruelty — a cruel, 
bloodthirsty man he was — and, sailing for England, died soon after his arrival, 
and the world's population of scoundrels was lessened by just one. 

While the curious mixture of cavalier and criminal was working out the 



burned the town. 



So THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

early destinies of Virginia, a deeply religious element in Nottinghamshire and 
Yorkshire, England, were being educated by adversity for an adventure of a 
very different sort. At Scrooby, in 1606, a congregation of Separatists or 
Bronnists, who were ultra Puritans, used to meet secretly for worship at the 
house of their elder, William Brewster. King James, like most renegades, was a 
good persecutor, and he finally drove the Scrooby church to flee. Led by their 
pastor, that wisest and gentlest of the Puritans, John Robinson, the little com- 
pany escaped to Holland. The history of their ten years of sorrow and hard- 
ship in Amsterdam and Leyden is too well known to require repetition here. 
It is impossible to overestimate the influence of such a man as Robinson, or to 
question the permanency of the impression which his character and teaching 
made upon his flock. 

Procuring a patent from the London company, the Scrooby-Leyden Sepa- 
ratists prepared for their adventure. Only about half the Holland company 
could get ready, and it fell to the pastor's lot to stay with those who were left 
behind. Embarking on the Speedwell, at Delft Haven, the colonists bade 
good-by to their friends and directed their course to England, where they 
were joined by the Mayflower. 

ARRIVAL OF THE MAYFLOWER. 

The Speedwell was found to be unseaworthy, so at length most of her 
passengers were transferred to the Mayflower, which proceeded on the voyage. 
To those who know how small a vessel of 180 tons is, the fact that one hundred 
souls, besides the crew, were upon a stormy ocean in her for more than sixty 
days, will be as eloquent as any description of their discomforts could be. The 
objective point was far to the southward of the land that they finally fell upon, 
which was not within the limits of their patent from the Virginia Company. But 
they dropped anchor in Cape Cod harbor, sick and weary with the voyage, and 
landed, giving thanks for their deliverance. With wisdom and frugality the 
plans for the home in the wilderness were made. 

Being too far North to be bound or protected by the provisions of the 
Virginia charter, the Pilgrims, as they called themselves, made a compact which 
was mutually protective. The terms of the contract foreshadowed republican 
institutions. Thus in character, purpose and outward surroundings the Puritan 
of Plymouth and the Cavalier of Jamestown differed essentially. The after 
development of the two settlements followed logically along these lines, empha- 
sizing these differences. 

Of the hundred sou-Is left in Plymouth only fifty per cent, remained alive 
when the supplies from England came, a year later. Scurvy, famine and 
exposure to the severe climate had killed most of the weakest of them. Not a 
household but had suffered loss. Yet not one offered to go back. Men and 



THE PILGRIMS OF THE "MAYFLOWER. 



Si 



women alike stood to their posts with a heroism that has never been excelled in 
the world's history. We read how they planted their corn in the graveyard 
when planting time came, so that the Indians might not discover the greatness 
of their loss. Cotton Mather, in writing of this dark time says, with that 
provoking, cold-blooded philosophy that can bear other people's troubles with 
equanimity: "If disease had not more easily fetched so many away to heaven," 

all must have died for lack 

of provisions. The Indians \ 1 - -' " / '' - / 

were at first very hostile, t 

owing to depredations com- ,____' 

mitted by a previous navi- 
gator, but they were too few 
in number to be very trouble- 
some. Squanto, who became 
the interpreter, and Samoset, 
a sagamore from the east- 
ern coast, were their first 
friends among the red men. 
Squanto was their tutor 
in husbandry and fishing. 
Then, too, came Hobba- 
mock, whom Longfellow has 
immortalized as the "friend 
of the white man." The 
names of those who formed 
this little colony have be- 
come household words all 
over the land. Miles Stan- 
dish, John Alden, Priscilla, 
Elder Brewster, Bradford, — 
where are these names not 
known ? 

Frugal as the Pilgrims 
were, and industrious, they 
found that their inexperience in planting maize, together with other drawbacks, 
kept them on the edge of starvation for several years. Clams became at one 
time the staple diet, and were about all that the settlers had to regale their 
friends with, when a new ship-load of those that had been left behind in Leyden, 
arrived. 

A description of Plymouth, given in 1626, shows the situation of the town : 
A broad street, "about a cannon shot of eight hundred yards long," bordered 




UtMOR WORN BY THE PILGRIMS IN 162O. 



82 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



by the houses of hewn planks, followed by a brook down the hillside. A second 
road crossed the first, and at the intersection stood the Governor's house. Upon 




the mound known as "burial hill" was a 

building which served the double purpose of 

a fort and a church. A stockade surrounded 

the whole. At first the agricultural and other 

labors of the people had been communistic, in 

accordance with the conditions of the London 

Company's charter. But in 1624 this plan was 

done away with and the lands thereafter held separately. Still the people, 

unlike those of Virginia, continued to dwell in towns, and their habits in this 

respect descended to their children. 



.MILES STANDISH HOI.Iis A COUNCIL WITH 
THE INDI \Ns. 



BOUNDARY DISPUTES AND INDIAN WARS. 



83 



The second New England colony was that of Massachusetts Bay, which 
was sent out by a company provided with a charter very much like that of Vir- 
ginia. The provisions of this patent allowed for the appointment of officers by 
the company, but it was not stated where the headquarters of the company were 
to be. This important oversight allowed the transplanting of the company, with 
officers, elective power, and other democratic rights, to New England. The 
company, which pretended to be a commercial organization, was really composed 
of Puritans, who, though not Separatists, were strict to the point of fanaticism. 
The leader of the first emigrants was John Endicott. His followers numbered 
less than a hundred souls, 
with which little force he 
planted Salem. The Salem 
colonists, though they had 
known less persecution and 
hardship than those of Ply- 
mouth, or perhaps for that 
reason, yet were more intol- 
erant and Quixotic in their 
rules for self government, 
in social observances, and 
especially in their dealings 
with people of other reli- 
gious sects. The transfer- 
ence of the government of 
the company, together with 
the addition of over eight 
hundred new colonists, was 
made in 1630. 

As the Massachusetts 
colonies grew they excited 
the jealousy or animosity of 
two very different classes of 
people. These were their 

Dutch neighbors and the Indians. The most serious of the early difficulties 
with the aborigines was, in fact, the effect of Dutch interference. These 
people had purchased the Connecticut river lands from the Pequots. The 
Pequots only held the territory by usurpation and the original owners obtained 
the Puritan protection, giving them a rival title. The enraged Pequots com- 
menced hostilities which were promptly resented by the Puritan Governor, 
Endicott, who led his men into the Indian country, punishing the assailants 
severely. This act, however necessary it may have been, laid the colony open 




A PIONEER FLEEING FROM ENRAGED PEQUOTS. 



84 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



to all the cruelty of a long-continued war, which lasted until the final rem- 
nant of the Pequot tribe had been extinguished. 




A l'l mi. Mi m \, \i r i 



The war with Philip, Massasoit's 
son, occurred in 1675, when the col- 
ony was stronger and better able to 
bear the tax upon its vigor, but during the year in which it lasted the settle- 



H END RICK HUDSON. 85 

merits were frightfully crippled. Six hundred houses had been burned, the 
fighting force of the English had been decimated, and the fruits of years of 
labor wasted. The whole difficulty arose from the Puritans' " lust for inflicting 
justice," and might have been avoided. 

One of the most significant, as well as beneficial, of early New England 
institutions was the "town meeting," which ranked next to "the meetinghouse 
worship " in importance to the colonist ; for while in one he indulged liberty of 
conscience, the other allowed him liberty of speech. Having both his speech 
and his conscience under control, the Puritan took a sober delight in their 
indulgence. The town meeting was in the New Englander's blood, and it needed 
only the peculiar conditions of his new life to bring it out. His ancestors had had 
their Folkmotes where all questions of public policy and government were freely 
discussed. So it came natural to him to gather in unsmiling earnestness with his 
neighbors, and attend to their plans or suggest others for their mutual guidance 
and safety. This ventilation of grievances and expression of views did more, in 
all probability, to prepare for the part which New England should take in future 
political movements than any other one agency. 

HENDRICK HUDSON. 

The discovery of the Hudson River, and that of Lake Champlain occurred 
at nearly the same time, each discoverer immortalizing himself by the exploit. 
That of Hudson has, however, been of vastly more importance to America and 
the world than that of his French contemporary. 

Hudson was known as a great Arctic explorer prior to his discovery of 
the site of America's metropolis. He had previously sailed under English 
patronage, but now he and his little "Half-Moon" were in the service ot the 
Dutch East India Company, and in search of a northwest passage, which he 
essayed to find by way of Albany, but failed. At the same time Smith was 
searching the waters of the Chesapeake. In 161 4, the charter granting all of 
America between Virginia and Canada was received by the "Company of the 
New Netherlands " from the lately formed States General of Holland. The 
command of so magnificent a river system as that of the Hudson and its 
tributaries established almost at once the status and success of the Dutch 
colony. 

The States General held complete control of their American dependency. 
They appointed governors and councillors and provided them with laws. 
Ordinarily, the people seemed to care as little to mix with politics as does the 
modern average New Yorker, a good deal of bad government being considered 
better than a little trouble. 

Once in a while a governor got in some difficulty over the Indian question, 
and called a council of citizens to help him, but ordinarily he was despotic. 



86 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The colonists were content to wax fat without kicking. They were honest, 
shrewd, «x>od-natured, tolerant bodies, as different from the New Englander 
as from the Virginian, or as either of these neighbors was from the other. 
Primarily traders, they found themselves in one of the best trading grounds in 
the world, with nothing serious to prevent them from growing rich and 
multiplying. This they proceeded to do with less noise and more success than 
either of the other contemporary settlements. In the fifty years of Dutch rule, 
the population of New Amsterdam reached eight thousand souls. The 
character of the city was so cosmopolitan that it has been estimated that no 
less than twelve languages were spoken there. Free trade obtained, in 
contrast to the policy of New England and Virginia. The boundary difficulties 
with the Puritan colonies were a constant irritation, but were allowed to 
slumber when it was necessary to make common cause against the Indians. 

THE DUTCH LOSE NEW AMSTERDAM. 

In the time of Petrus Stuyvesant, the last of the Dutch governors, the 
rivalry which existed between the English and Dutch nations regarding the 
trade of the new world led the treacherous Charles II of England to send an 
armament in a time of profound peace to take the colony of a friendly nation. 

Colonel Richard Nichols commanded the expedition. His orders caused 
him to stop at the Massachusetts Bay for reinforcements. The colonists there 
were reluctant to aid him, but those of Connecticut joined eagerly with the 
expedition, and Governor Winthrop took part in it. The colony passed, 
without a blow, with hardly a murmur on the part of the people, though 
considerably to the rage of Governor Stuyvesant, into the hands of the English, 
to be known thenceforth as New York. Notwithstanding the success of the 
Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, it was unquestionably a most important 
advantage in the after history of America that it should have fallen into the 
hands of the English. 

As a conservative element, the peaceful, prosperous Friend was of immense 
value in colonial development. The grant which William Penn obtained in 1681 
gave him a tract of forty thousand square miles between the estates of York 
and Baltimore. Penn's charter was in imitation of that granted to Maryland, 
with important differences. With the approval of Lord Baltimore, laws passed 
by the Maryland Assembly were valid, but the king reserved the right to approve 
the laws of Pennsylvania. The same principle was applied to the right of 
taxation. There was about fifty years between the two charters. 

The- settlement of New Jersey by Quakers was that which first drew Penn's 

, attention to America. In drawing up the plans for his projected State he did so 

in accordance with Quaker ideas, which in point of humanity were far in advance 

of the times. The declaration that o-overnments exist for the sake of the 



88 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

governed, that the purpose of punishment is reformation, that justice to Indians 
as well as to white men should be considered, were startling in their novelty. 

The success of this enterprise was instant and remarkable. In three years 
the colony numbered eight thousand people. The applications for land poured 
in and the affairs of the colonists were wisely administered, and before the 
death of her great founder, Pennsylvania was firmly established. Education 
was a matter of care from the very start in Philadelphia, although throughout 
the rest of the state it was neglected for many years. Indian troubles were 
scarcely known. The great blot on the scutcheon of the Quaker colony was 
the use of white slaves, for whom Philadelphia became the chief market in the 
new world. Not less remarkable than the unity of time which characterized the 
planting of several American settlements was the unity of race into which 
they all finally merged, with few and slight exceptions, so that in after years 
all of the various lines of development which have been indicated in this 
chapter should combine to form a more complete national life. Penn made a 
treaty with the Indians, and kept it; and herein lies the secret of his success. 
If only all treaties had been kept, what bloodshed might not have been 
avoided ! 



CHAPTER IV. 



MAKING THE NEW PEOPLE. 




A NliW l.MII.AM. Wl.AVtR \\ I 



AFTER the colonists had forced the issue 
with fortune and had got more in touch 
with their new surroundings, they began 
to discover the fallacy of most of their 
first notions and to adjust themselves 
to the new problems as best they could. 
The day when the settlement of a new 
world could be regarded as an experi- 
ment with possible fabulous results was 
over. They had come to stay, and they 
understood that staying meant winning 
and winning meant working. 
The early notion that great fortunes were waiting to be picked up in the New 
Land, and that gold and silver and precious stones were almost to be had for the 
asking, had given place to a settled conviction that intelligent labor only would 
enable the settler to retain his foothold. Aid from the mother countries could not 
be depended upon, precarious as it was, nor was it to be desired. There were 
object lessons in frugality and industry that the colonist had set before him 
every day ; lessons that he finally learned by heart. 

As has been very wisely said, the problem which confronted the new 
people was one of changed conditions. Whereas in England harvests were 
reckoned at their cost per acre, in America they were counted at their cost per 
man, because in the old country labor was plentiful and land scarce, and in the 
new it was just the reverse. So he who cultivated the soil after old country 
methods must, of necessity, find want oppressing him and starvation lurking 
with the wolves and bears in his forests. Successful farming must be "skim- 
ming " the plentiful new land. To cut and burn wood-land, cultivate grain 
between the stumps, and abandon old holdings for new, was the necessity of 
the hour. 

Elsewhere we will speak of the influence of a staple upon the social and 



9 o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

political life of Virginia. The first staple was tobacco. The growth of rice in 
the south did not begin till some years after the establishment of tobacco ; and 
cotton culture was never really begun, except in a small way for domestic 
demands, till after independence was achieved, when the invention of Whitney's 
cotton gin had made it possible to minimize the immense labor of hand-cleaning. 

The cultivation of rice, which had previously been grown in Madagascar, 
began in South Carolina in 1696, when a planter named Thomas Smith got 
from the captain of a brigantine a bag of rice for seed. Smith had been in 
Madagascar, and the appearance of some black wet soil in his garden suggested 
to him the soil of the rice plantations on that island. The experiment was a 
complete and instant success. Smith's rice grew luxuriantly and multiplied 
so that he was able to provide his neighbors with seed. This at first they 
attempted to grow upon the higher ground, but shortly found that the swamps 
were better adapted for the staple. 

In three years from the time of the first distribution of seed Thomas Smith 
had been made Governor of the colony. The people of South Carolina who 
had borrowed a staple for years and who had not made the advance in pros- 
perity that other colonists had, at last were blessed with a product all their own, 
one which was perfectly adapted to the soil. They learned to husk the rice, 
at first by hand but afterwards by horse power and tide mills. Then rice culture 
began to spread to Georgia, to Virginia, even as far North as New Jersey, but 
nowhere did it succeed as well as in the Carolinas. Even to-day the people of 
that section have cause to bless the forethought of Smith and the head winds 
that blew the brigantine with her rice cargo into a harbor on that coast. 

Carolina also tried indigo growing, which became profitable about the 
middle of the 1 8th century. Miss Eliza Lucan, afterwards Mrs. Pinckney, 
mother of General Pinckney, deserves the credit of its introduction. 

The Northern farmer, from the first, cultivated only a few acres compared 
with the large Southern plantations. His efforts were confined to the produc- 
tion of wheat and corn. Indian corn was grown from the very earliest New 
England days ; the Indians had taught the white men their own method of 
manuring the corn hills by putting in each a codfish. Rye, little used as a food 
grain, was cultivated by certain Scotch and Irish settlers as a basis for whiskey. 
New Vork, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were the great bread producers. In 
the year 1770, or thereabouts, the value of flour and bread exports reached 
$3,000,000. This was the result of a century and a half of patient, intelligent 
labor. 

All along the northern coast the importance of the fisheries was felt, from 
the early French settlements on Newfoundland, that antedated any successful 
planting of colonists on the main land of North America, till the development of 
the trreat fisheries of New England. The astonishment of those who described 



THE STAPLES. 



91 



the country at an early period was occasioned by the teeming life, the marvelous 
fertility, of all creatures, cither in the ocean or on 'the land. The immense 
schools of cod gave to the inhabitants of the coast employment which soon 
rose to the dignity of an industry. From Salem, Cape Cod and many other 
points, fleets of small vessels went and returned, till a generation of sailors who 
should accomplish more important voyages and adventures was bred on the 
fishing banks. 

One of the most curious chapters in the history of husbandry in the New 
World is that of the attempt to force a staple. Some one conceived the idea 




FAIRFAX COUR1 HOUSE — A TYPICAL VIRGINIA COURT HOUS] 

that the heavy duties that made the silk of France and Southern Europe so 
expensive might be avoided by raising the silk-worm and manufacturing the 
fabric in the British colonies. About 1623 the silk-worm was brought to 
\ r irginia, and a law was enacted making the planting of mulberry trees, the food 
of the silk-worm, compulsory. The House of Burgesses passed resolutions of 
the most exacting character. It also offered premiums for the production of 
silk, and in other ways endeavored to foster the new industry. It was required 
that every citizen should plant one mulberry tree to every ten acres of ground. 
Among the rewards offered was one of ten thousand pounds of tobacco for 



9 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

fifty pounds of silk. This was in 1658. That seemed to be a generous year 
with the Burgesses, for they also offered the same amount of tobacco for the 
production of a certain small quantity of wine from grapes grown in the colony. 
The silk laws were withdrawn in Virginia in 1666. 

Georgia, too, had a silk craze, and Pennsylvania and Delaware also went 
heavily into the production. Charles II wore a complete court dress of Amer- 
ican silk, which, it is said, must have cost its weight in gold to produce. The 
efforts to revive the silk industry were several times attempted, but without 
success. Except that we occasionally hear that some member of the British 




AN OLD-TIME COLONIAL HOUSE. 
(Built in 1634, Bedford, Mass.) 



royal family was clad in American silk, we might almost doubt the existence of 
the industry. 

Vine planting and wine making were among the " encouraged " industries. 
All of these Utopian schemes for the acquisition of sudden wealth failed because 
they were not based upon any true appreciation of natural conditions in the 
New World. 

Fruits and vegetables were grown very early in the seventeenth century. 
In the latter part of the century a fresh impetus was given to horticulture by 
John Bartram, the Quaker, at Philadelphia. 



FEUDALISM IN AMERICA, 93 

Horses and cattle, especially in the South, were allowed to run wild in the 
woods till the forests were full of them, and hunting this large game became a 
favorite amusement. Horses were so numerous in some places as to be a 
nuisance. New England adopted an old English custom, and the people herded 
their live stock in common, appointing general feeding places and overseers for 
it. The laws of England were such as to discourage sheep raising in the New 
World, and the wolves seconded the laws, but the farmers persisted, neverthe- 
less, though they were not so successful in this as in some other pursuits. 

As soon as the immediate necessity for the guns and stockades of the town 
were removed, those of the more favored colonists of Virginia who had obtained 
land grants began to separate, forming manorial estates and engaging in the 
production of staples, principal among which was tobacco. The tenants were 
practically serfs at first, and the introduction of slave labor made the proprietor 
even more independent, if possible, than he had been before, giving him 
authority almost absolute within his own domains, even to the power over 
human life. 

It has been truly said that "that which broke down representation by 
boroughs and made the parish a vast region with very little corporate unity, was 
the lighting upon a staple." Tobacco and rice were the responsible agents for 
Virginia's social and political conditions, which resulted in the production of 
strong, self-reliant, and brave, though impetuous and uncontrollable men. 

From the first, none of the great colonies bore so close a resemblance to 
England in the development of a feudal system as Virginia. The ownership ol 
what would be to us vast tracts of land, was due to the way in which Virginia 
was settled. Men of no especial note held estates of ten, twenty, or thirty thou- 
sand acres. This was the result of the very rapid increase in the cultivation of 
the great staple. For a great many years the white servants were much more 
numerous than the blacks, and with indentured servitude, which was equal to 
slavery in all points but that of perpetuity ; then arose the great class distinctions, 
which were almost unknown in the New England colonies, although originally 
the rural Virginia land-owner and the New England settler were of the same 
class. The effect of environment on social development can nowhere be traced 
more distinctly than in the first two great English colonies in America. 

Town life, as remarked elsewhere, was not known in Virginia. Up to the 
time of the war for independence her largest towns numbered only a very few 
thousand souls — not more than many a Northern village. There were very few 
roads and very many water-ways, so that the trading vessels could reach the 
individual plantation much more easily than the plantations could reach each 
other. The English custom of entail was early transplanted to Virginia, with 
some adaptations to suit the new conditions. The abolition of this system was 
due to Thomas Jefferson, as late as 1776. 



94 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



The Virginia substitute for the New England town meeting, committees, 
etc., was the vestry and parish system, modeled in part after the English parish. 
The vestrymen in each parish, however, were twelve representatives chosen 
by the people of the parish. This at least was the case at first, till by obtaining 
power to fill vacancies they became practically self-elective. The vestrymen 
were apportioners and collectors of taxes, overseers of the poor, and governors 
of the affairs of the church. Their presiding officer was the minister. 

Mr. John Fiske, in his admirable text-book, " Civil Government in the 
United States," makes this observation: "In New England, the township was 
the unit of representation, but in Virginia the parish was not the unit of repre- 
sentation ; the county was that unit. In the colonial legislature of Virginia the 
representatives sat not for parishes but for counties." The county was arbitrarily 




nil) SPANISH HOUSE on l'.oURIil IN STREET. NEW ORLEANS. 



defined as to physical limits, nor were any particular number of parishes required 
to constitute it. There might be one parish or a dozen. The machinery of 
county government consisted principally of a court which met once a month in 
some central place, where a court-house was erected. There it tried minor 
criminal offences and major civil actions. The court also was one of probate, 
and had the supervision of highways, appointing the necessary servants and 
officials. Like the parishes, the county courts, in course of time, became 
self-elective. 

The taxes, like many other obligations, were paid in tobacco, of which the 
sheriff was the collector and custodian. He also presided at elections for 
representatives to the colonial assembly. 

There were eight justices of the peace, in each county. These were 



WHITE SLAVERY. 



95 



nominated by the court (/. e., by their own body), and appointed by the 
Governor. The election, or rather appointment of the sheriff was conducted in 
the same way practically, so that we see how little voice the people really had 
in either parochial or county government. 

On July 30, 1619, Virginia's first General Assembly convened; as the 
English historian said, " A House of Burgesses b)'okc out in Virginia." These 
Burgesses were at first the representatives of plantations, of which each chose 
two. The duty of the Assembly was to counsel the Governor ; or, more nearly 
in accordance with the facts, to keep him in check and make his life miserable. 
In 1634 the Burgesses first sat for counties, upon the new political formation. 

So it will be seen that the earliest form of representative government 
in the Colonies began in Virginia ; and 
that it was not government by the voice 
of the people, is apparent. The poor 
whites, or "white trash," as they were 
called at a later day, had little or no 
voice. The rights and liberties that 
were contended for were those of the 
rich and powerful. As in England, 
civil liberty began with the barons and 
did not extend to those in the humbler 
walks of life, so in Virginia, it was the 
planter, the proprietor of acres, the 
owner of slaves, who first guarded his 
own rights against despotism. 

In New England, on the contrary, 
such a thing as caste was hardly known. 
Town life induced a development very 
different from that of plantation life. 
Perhaps the individual was less aggres- 
sively independent. Perhaps the long course of bickering and obstruction on 
the part of Virginia's Burgesses against her governors, was as good a school 
as possible for future essays — the direction of national liberty ; but it is certain 
that New England could show a high level of intelligence all along the line. 
She had no "poor whites." While the distinctly influential class was not so 
prominently developed, each man had influence. He counted one, always. 

The practice of sending criminals and the offscouring of England to 
the Colonies under articles of bondage became established. Men were sold, 
some voluntarily, and others by force, for a term of years. The broken-down 
gentlemen, soldiers, and adventurers who composed the bulk of the inhabitants, 
found this system of white slavery to their temporary advantage, and the 




JLD VIRGINIA MANSION. 



96 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



exodus of those creatures from London was doubtless a relief to the authorities 
there. 

Sandys, the Treasurer of the Virginia Company, sent, in 1619, thirty young 
women, whose moral characters were vouched for, who were bought as wives 
by the colonists upon their arrival ; the price of passage being the value set 
upon each damsel. 

As the years went by, the evil of this system of bondage became more 
and more apparent, and spread to other parts of the country. Philadelphia, the 




THE JAMES RIVER AND COUNTRY NEAR RICHMOND. 



Quaker refuge, was a white slave mart. Such terms as " Voluntary sales," 
" Redemptioners," "Soul Drivers," "Kids," "Free Willers," "Trepanning," 
etc., were familiar throughout the new land. 

Kidnapping in England, for the Colonies, was so common that it became 
the cause of violent agitation. Even youth of rank were not exempt from 
the danger and degradation. Those who carried on the business of trepan- 
ning were known as "Spirits." Criminals under sentence of death, might 
have the sentence commuted to seven years' servitude. Artisans and laborers 



COTTON MATHER AND THE WITCHES. 97 

who were unemployed could be "retained" by force, under certain conditions. 
Of course, these bond-servants were a source of moral and social trouble and 
danger to the colonists. 

The usual impression regarding the Puritans is that they were austere, 
unsmiling men, with much hard fanaticism and little of the milk of human 
kindness. That they did suffer much and cause others to suffer for conscience 
sake is undoubtedly true, but no special pleading should be required to convince 
those who read the early history of New England carefully, that the highest of 
Christian virtues flourished quite as much in the Boston of the seventeenth 
century as in the Boston of the eighteenth or nineteenth. 

The good John Winthrop, first Governor of Massachusetts, who was firm 
and even severe in his administration of the government, so that he frequently 
felt the results of unpopularity, was, as one writer calls him, "most amiable" in 
his private character. A neighbor, accused of stealing from Winthrop's wood- 
pile, was brought before him. The Governor had announced that he would 
take such measures that the thief should never be able to rob him again, so, of 
course, the case attracted attention. " You have taken my wood," said Winthrop, 
in effect; "You have my permission to keep on doing so. Help yourself as 
long as the winter lasts." 

We can imagine the scene when his servant, who used to be sent with 
messages to the poorer neighbors about dinner time, returned from one of his 
visits. The Governor's interest quickened as he listened to the details of the 
meals at which the servant had acted as a spy. Mr. So-and-so was without 
meat, this one lacked bread, and that other ate his bread dry. The good man 
expressed his sympathy in the best possible way, by sharing his larder. 

The man who had been one of Winthrop's angry opponents owned himself 
vanquished when he received from the object of his animosity a cow, in his 
time of need. In a quaint fashion he expressed himself: "Sir, by overcoming 
yourself you have overcome me." 

The best early history of the colony of Massachusetts is that written by 
Governor Winthrop. Next to that work in value is Cotton Mather's Magnalia 
Cliristi Americana, which is a history of the colony in all its interests and 
affairs, from the year 1620 to 1689. 

COTTON MATHER AND THE WITCHES. 

Cotton Mather's name is perhaps most widely known as the great instigator 
of persecution in the time of the witchcraft terror. A man of great and varied 
learning, he was, singularly devoid of common sense, and allowed himself to 
be swayed by opinions that bear a close resemblance to those of insanity. 
Unfortunately, through his great influence, and perhaps by virtue of that quality 
which we have learned to call "personal magnetism," he succeeded in inoculat- 

7 



9 s 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



ing a majority of the most influential people of Massachusetts with his singular 
craze. There had been executions for witchcraft in New England before Doctor 
Mather's time, but in the revival of persecution he was most prominent. 

Especially severe have some New York writers of later years been, in com- 
menting upon this reign of 
terror in New England, yet 
New York's history has 




A DUTCH HOUSEHOLD. 



had a darker chapter of 
cruelty. Twenty hangings 
for witchcraft occurred in 
Salem ; nearly double that number of persons were burned at the stake in New 
York City, upon the ground until recently known as the " Five Points." Both 
of these occurrences were in the same generation, but the one was the result of 
delusion, while the other resulted from abject terror, caused by one Mary 



A PROTEST AGAINST PERSECUTION. 



99 



Burton, a criminal character, who pretended to have information of a negro 
insurrection, and then for a few pounds swore away forty lives. Virginia, too, 
had her witch trials, though not carried to the lengths that those of Salem were, 
and even tolerant Maryland has her record of witch hanging. And surely none 
can fail to honor Samuel Sewell, of Massachusetts, whose public expression of 
sorrow for the part he had taken in the witch executions was one of the first 
signs of recovery from the popular delusion. 

In like manner the persecutions of the Friends were due to the same sombre, 
sadly mistaken views of religious duty. Undoubtedly the New England Quakers 
were guilty of some actions which must have greatly annoyed the Puritans. The 
gentlest, kindliest, and, in some respects, the most enlightened people in the 
New World showed sometimes a most exasperating obstinacy in doing things 
which should shock the strict ideas of propriety which the Pilgrims possessed. 
For instance, in New London Pastor Mather Byles was greatly annoyed 
by having Ouaker men sit with their hats on and women with their spinning 
wheels in the aisles, industriously working during service on the Lord's 
day. As soon as the Quakers were settled, when no one opposed them the 
aggressive side of their character, as shown in symbolic acts of an exaggerated 
kind, does not seem to have manifested itself at all. 

A PROTEST AGAINST PERSECUTION. 

In the middle of the century the beginning of the protest against Ouaker 
persecution began to be felt. Nicholas Upsall, pastor of the Boston Church, 
first opposed it. He was promptly fined twenty pounds and banished. He was 
refused a home in Plymouth and returned to Cape Cod, where he succeeded in 
inoculating a number of other people with his views. Robinson, son of the 
Leyden pastor, was sent by the General Court of Massachusetts to visit the 
Quakers and expostulate with them. He decided that there was no harm in 
them and made an able defence of them, for which he was disfranchised. The 
prejudice, once started, took years to eradicate. Perhaps a few lines from 
Cotton Mather on this subject may not be out of place. He says : — 

"It was also thot that the very Quakers themselves would say that, if they had got into a 
corner of the world and with immense toyl and change made a wilderness habitable in order there 
to be undisturbed in the exercise of their worship, they would never hear to have New Englanders 
come among them and interrupt their public worship, endeavor to seduce their children from it, yea, 
and repeat such endeavors after mild entreaties first and then just banishment." 

It is probable that in an age when we are more fond of finding causes for 
things than of suffering for conscience sake we will blame neither party in this 
obsolete quarrel. It was incompatibility of temper. 

Another of the matters about which the public is apt to be severe upon the 



ioo THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Puritans is the code known as " Blue Laws," concerning which a great deal has 
been said by people who value themselves upon their " liberal " views. 

Rules relating to Sabbath observances are quoted. We are told indig- 
nantly that the Puritan could not kiss his wife or children on the Sabbath, nor 
walk in his garden, nor do any one of a number of things that are innocent and 
proper. 

There is just one answer to these strictures. The Blue laws were wholly 
unknown to the Puritans. They were invented by that Tory wag, Dr. Samuel 
Peters, whose humorous " History of Connecticut" was as seriously taken by 
some folks as was Washington Irving's " Knickerbocker" a generation later. It 
is not probable that Dr. Peters ever supposed that they would be taken seriously. 
Of Puritans, Quakers, and other religionists of the olden time we are apt to 
think as though they were separate varieties of the human race, not to be under- 
stood by the light of any common experience of human nature, while in fact 
they were very human — and (perhaps in consequence) very much lied about. 

THE HUDSON RIVER ESTATES. 

Washington Irving has humorously dwelt upon facts in his relation of the 
differences which occurred between the Dutch Government in New Amsterdam 
and the Patroons whose little principalities were further up the Hudson River. 
The grants to the patroons were such as to insure to them almost absolute con- 
trol upon their estates, with only the shadow of allegiance. The fact that the 
great patroons allowed a semblance of subserviency to the metropolitan 
governor was rather a question of their advantage than of their necessity. 

The holdings were immense. The Livingstone estate was sixteen by 
twenty-eight miles in extent ; the Van Courtlandts owned eight hundred square 
miles ; the Rensselaer manor contained five hundred and seventy-five square 
miles. Sir Vredryk Flypse, the richest man in the colony, possessed the fairest 
portion of the river from Spuyten Duyvel Creek to the Croton River. From 
the mill on his manor he shipped grain and other commodities direct to Holland 
and to the West Indies, and received rum and other exchanges from those 
countries, without either clearing or entering at the port of New Amsterdam 
(or New York as it afterwards was called). Flypse, Van Courtlandt, and 
Bayard were keen politicians as well as successful traders. To them is credited 
the hanging of Governor Zeisler, and they were hotly charged with receiving 
from Kidd, whose privateering commission they had procured, a share of his 
piratical booty. 

Upon the great estates, the exactions of the lords proprietors drove many 
tenants out of the colony. Some of the patroons even went to the length of 
asserting their right to eject tenants and reassume the land at will. This course 
of procedure retarded the growth and development of the Hudson River 



SCHOOLS IN THE NORTH AND SOUTH. 



Settlements for many years. In some respects the threat estates and assump- 
tion of feudal authority in 
New York were very much 
like the monopolies of land 
and power in the South. 
But in one thing New Am- 
sterdam differed very much 
from Virginia ; that was in 
the possession of a thriving, 
busy city that should coun- 





terbalance the spirit 
of feudalism by its 
democratic disposi- 
tion. 

How can we 
close this chapter 
better than by refer- 
ence to the beginnings of what 
we hold most precious of all 
the legacies which the fore- 
fathers of the American people 
left to their descendants ? 

In Virginia Governor 
Berkeley, in 1671 thanked God 
that there were no free schools, 
nor were likely to be for a 
hundred years. But less than 
twenty years afterward, a different feeling began to prevail. William's and Mary's 
College was founded by James Blair in 1692. But already a university was in 



THE ATTACK ON RIOTERS AT SPRINGFIELD, MASS., IN I786. 



102 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

existence in the North, and the first common-school system, probably, that the 
world had ever known, had been established half a century in Massachusetts. 
Salem's free-school dates back to 1640, and the state adopted a general plan 
for common schools seven years later ; a plan, the purpose of which was set 
forth in language so remarkable, that it should be preserved through all time — 
a few sentences we can give : "That learning may not be buried in the grave 
of our faith in the church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our 
endeavors, — It is therefore ordered, that every township in this jurisdiction after 
the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders shall then 
forthwith appoint one within their town to write and to read, . . . and it is 
further ordered that where any town shall increase to the number of one 

hundred families they shall set up a grammar-school to instruct youth 

so far that they may be fitted for the university." 

Maryland was nearly a century in following this lead. Rhode Island, 
beginning where Massachusetts did, fell from grace in educational matters 
till 1800. Philadelphia had good schools at a very early date, and New 
Amsterdam, or New York, moved very slowly, doubtless feeling confident 
that, whatever their attitude toward letters, her children would instinctively 
learn the use of figures. But we cannot pursue this matter widiout trenching 
upon another chapter. It is difficult to conceive that from the various forma- 
tive elements in the lives of the early colonists, a single one could have been 
well spared in the making of the new people. 

But Virginia was not the only State troubled with insurrection. Massachu- 
setts had a like experience. It was in 1 786 that the movement broke out, 
Daniel Shay, a Revolutionary captain, having been rather forced to the head as 
leader, so that it became known as Shay's Rebellion. The pretext of the 
rebellion was the high salary paid the Governor, the aristocratic character of the 
Senate, the extortions of lawyers, and the oppressive taxation. In December, 
1786, he led a considerable force of rioters to Worcester, where he prevented 
the holding of the U. S. Court, and with 2000 men traveled to Springfield, 
Mass., January, 17S7, to capture the arsenal [see engraving], but was repulsed 
by the militia under General Shepard. Finally, defeated, he fled the State, but 
he was pardoned the following year by Governor Bowdoin. Ultimately he 
received a pension for Revolutionary services. He died September 29th, 1825, 
at Sparta, N. Y., whither he had removed. 



CHAPTER V. 



OLD COLONY DAYS AND WAYS. 

MANY were the varieties of New England life before 
the American Revolution. Each township maintained 
its own peculiar laws ; clung to its own peculiar cus- 
toms ; cherished its own peculiar traditions. Never, 
perhaps, except in Greece, were local self-government 
and local patriotism pushed to such an extreme. Not 
only did commonwealth hold itself separate from com- 
monwealth, but township from township, and often, 
village from village. Long stretches of uninhabited 
land effectively divided these self-reliant communities 
from one another. "The road to Boston," says one 
of the most graphic of New England's local historians,* 
when speaking of the route from Buzzard's Bay, in 
1743, was "narrow and tortuous — a lane through a 
forest — having rocks and quagmires and long reaches 
of sand, which made it almost impassable to wheels, if 
any there were to be ventured upon it. Branches of 
large trees were stretched over it, so that it was 
unvisited by sunlight, except at those places where it 
crossed the clearings on which a solitary husbandman 
had established his homestead, or where it followed the 
sandy shores of some of those picturesque ponds which 
feed the rivers emptying into Buzzard's Bay. Occasionally a deer bounded across 
the path, and foxes were seen running into the thickets." Such roads, pictur- 
esque as they were, naturally discouraged travel. Occasionally a Congregational 
council called together the ministers of several towns at an installation or an 
ordination. Once a year the meeting of the General Court tempted the rural 
authorities up to the capital ; during a week's time a few travelers may have 




ANCIENT HORSE-SHOES PLOWED 

UP IN SCHENECTADY CO., N.Y. 
{In the New I '«> /.' State Agricultural 



* Mr. W. R. Bliss, in his " Colonial Times on Buzzard's Bay," an excellent depiction of early 
New England life, from which other quotations will appear later in this chapter. 



104 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 




COLONIAL PLOW WITH WOODEN MOLD-BOARD. I706 
(State Agricultural Museum, Albany, N. V.) 



ridden by on horseback and baited at the village, inn ; now and then a visitor 
came to town, making no little stir, or perhaps a new immigrant settled on the 
confines of the parish. But there were then no Methodist preachers, with short 
and frequent pastorates, and no commercial travelers, with boxes of the latest 
goods, who could serve as conductors of thought and gossip from village to 

village and make them homogeneous. 
America was not then a land of travelers. 
What little travel there might have been, 
was often still further discouraged by 
local ordinances, and in many a town, 
a citizen had to have a special permit 
from the Selectmen before he could enter- 
tain a guest for anything over a fort- 
night. Thus one father was fined ten- 
shillings for showing hospitality to his 
daughter beyond the legal period. In 
many a spot in early New England the 
protectionist principle was so thoroughly 
localized that the importation of labor, as well as of merchandise, was 
rigorously restricted. Towns so insulated naturally took on distinctive traits. 
Even religious customs, literal scripturalists as these people were, differed in 
different places. The Puritan Sabbath began on Saturday night in one 
commonwealth, on Sunday morning in another. In brief, no picture of any 
one town can serve as a picture of any other. 

To describe a typical Puritan home, therefore, is 
not easy. Yet it is not impossible. For the New 
England Puritans were a peculiar and easily distin- 
guished people. The fundamental differences in 
character which set them off from the rest of the 
world, are far more prominent to the eye than are the 
local differences which divided town from town. A 
Connecticut settler, or even a Rhode Island Baptist, 
might be taken for a Massachusetts Puritan, but a 
Knickerbocker could be mistaken for neither. 

To begin with, the New Englanders were the 
most truly benevolent and unselfish people of their 

time. They had hardly set foot on New England's shore before their history 
was marked by a magnanimous act of genuine forgiveness of injuries. It 
was in the middle of the landing at Plymouth Rock, when the colony was 
prostrated by illness and was exposed to the worst inclemencies of a 
new and inclement climate. "Destitute of every provision which the weak- 




ANCIENT HAND-MADE SPADE. 
(State Agr 



THE CHARACTER OF THE NEW ENGLANDER. 



105 




IRISH IMMIGRANT s FLAX- 
WHEEL. 



ness and daintiness of the invalid require," so runs the description of a 
well-known historian, " the sick lay crowded in the unwholesome vessel or in 
half-built cabins, heaped around with snow-drifts. The rude sailors refused 
them even a share of those coarse sea-stores which would 
have given a little variety to their diet, till disease spread 
among the crew and the kind ministrations of those 
whom they had neglected and affronted brought them 
to a better temper." There could be no better example 
of Christian forbearance than this. At the start the 
Indians also came within the scope of the Puritan's 
charity. He nursed them assiduously in times of small- 
pox, rescued many a child from a plague-stricken wigwam, 
helped them through times of famine, Christianized and 
partially civilized some of them, and in business dealings 
treated them not only justly but with a sincere though 
tactless kindness. The Puritan's home life was unselfish ; 
he was profoundly regardful of his children, though he 
evinced that regard not by indulging them, but by pains- 
taking discipline and a rigorous thrift, the better to provide for their future. 
It was a French Jesuit of die last century who testified that the New Englander, 
unlike the Canadian, labored for his heirs. These early settlers made staunch 

neighbors. They were ready at almost any 
time to leave their work to drive a pin 
or nail in a young home-maker's new 
dwelling-house as a token of their good 
will, while they found their greatest pleas- 
ures in such means of mutual helpfulness 
as corn-huskings, quilting-bees, and barn- 
raisings. They were, no doubt, exacting 
and unsympathetic masters, but in the 
commands which they enjoined they kept 
in view the moral welfare of their slaves 
and servants as of far greater importance 
than their own material prosperity. Never 
were slaves better treated than in New 
England. 

The Puritans were strenuously intent 

on making the world, not only better, 

but, as they thought, happier. It was to guard the more solid pleasures of a 

pure home-life and of an honest pride in one's country, that they bulwarked 

themselves against the encroachments of sordid self-indulgences. But they went 




A COLONIAL FLAX-WHEEL. 



io6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 




A COMFORT1ER, UR CHAFING-DISH. 

(New York State Cabinet of Natural history 

Albany ) 



about their task in crude fashion. They recognized, for instance, quite wisely, 
that there is no more insidious enemy of happiness than vanity, which makes a 
man utterly miserable whenever he is ignored and only uneasily pleased even 

when he is admired the most, but they tried to 
eradicate vanity from the human heart not by 
planting something better in its place, but by 
such petty sumptuary laws as prohibiting the 
wearing of lace. They simply attempted to cut 
off whatever might minister to vanity's indul- 
gence. Their chief reliance for improving the 
condition of the world was in a countless number 
of minute restrictions and self-limitations. The 
more law there is, however, the more there needs 
to be, for prohibit nine-pins and soon there will be a new game of ten-pins 
to prohibit also. So it was with the Puritans. Restriction was placed here 
and restriction was placed there, until restriction became constriction and grew 
intolerable. The children were never allowed to lose sight of parental regula- 
tions, the parents of township ordinances, 
the town of state laws. But it was in the 
number and pettiness of these laws, not 
any cruelty in them, which made them 
intolerable, for the humanity of New 
England's legislators is evinced in the fact 
that there were only ten crimes punish- 
able with death in New England when 
there were one hundred and sixty in Old 
England. The New Englanders were 
swaddled, not chained. The best that 
was in them did not have full play, but it 
had more play than it could have had in 
any other country, except Great Britain 
and Holland. 

From the start New England was a 
country of homes. The typical New 
England dwelling was the work of several 
generations. It had begun perhaps as a 
solidly built but plain rectangular house 
of one story and two rooms. In one of them the good wife cooked the meals 
on the hearth — and simple cooking was never better done — laid the table, as 
meal-time approached, with the neat wooden bowls, plates, platters, and spoons 
and primitive knives of the time, or, the meal over, received a neighbor dropping 




DUTCH HOUSE IN ALBANY, N. Y. 
{From an Old Print.) 



THE HOUSE AND THE HOME. 



107 



in on a friendly errand, or perhaps the minister gravely making the rounds of 
his parish. This was the living room, the centre of the family life. The 
other room contained two great bedsteads with their puffy feather-beds, while 
the trundle-bed in the corner betrayed the presence of little children in the 
household. If the iamily was large, a rude ladder led the way to a sleeping- 
place in the garret, the very spot for a boy with a romantic turn. 

Slowly but faithfully the farmer added to the size and to the comforts of his 
home. What a place the hearth soon became ! " In the wide fireplace and 
over the massive back-log, crane, jack, spit and pot-hook did substantial work, 




I'RI.MIIIVE MUDE (IF (.RINDING CORN. 



while the embers kept bake-kettle and frying-pan in hospitable exercise." Here 
was the place for the iron, copper or brass andirons, often wrought into curious 
devices and religiously kept bright and polished. In front of the fire was the 
broad wooden seat for four or five occupants, with its generously high back to 
keep off the cold. This was the famous New England settle, making an inviting 
and cozy retreat for the parents in their brief rests from labor, or perhaps for 
lovers when the rest of the house was still. On each side of the hearth, in lieu 
of better seats were wooden blocks on which the children sat as they drew close to 
the fire on winter evenings to work or read by its blaze. Perhaps, in some corner 
of the room could be seen the brass warming-pan, which every winter's evening 



io8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



was filled with embers and carried to the sleeping chambers to give a temporary 
warmth to the great feather-beds. There was a place near at hand for the 
snow-shoes, while matchlocks, swords, pikes, halbert, and some pieces of 
armor fixed against the wall showed that the farmer obeyed the town 
ordinances and kept himself prepared against Indian raids. 

For like all frontiersmen, these farmers never felt secure. The Indians, 
instigated by the French, and exasperated by the cheating and bullying English 
adventurers, who had crept into New England against the colonists' will, were 
not only the cruelest of foes, they were the most treacherous of friends. They 
had pillaged and destroyed more than one secluded and unsuspecting settle- 
ment, murdering, torturing, or carrying into captivity, as they pleased, the 

peaceful inhabitants. The big, 
vague rumors of such midnight 
raids exercised their uncanny spell 
over many a household as it 
gathered about the hearth of a 
winter's evening. There was the 
Deerfield massacre, for instance. 
Just before the dawn of a cold 
winter's night the Indians fell 
upon the fated village. They 
spent twenty-four hours in wanton 
destruction, slaughtered sixty help- 
less prisoners, and carried a hun- 
dred back with them for an eight 
weeks' cruel march to the north, 
during which nineteen victims were 
murdered on the way and two 
were starved to death. 
Such was the story associated with the arms upon the wall ; but a happier 
story was told by the ears of corn, the crooknecks, the dried fruit, and the flitches 
of bacon hanging from the beams and ceiling of the room. They were a 
perpetual reminder of Thanksgiving Day. If the Puritan discountenanced 
Christmas observances as smacking of " papishness " — such was the narrow- 
mindedness of the times — he showed by this feast-day, his appreciation of the 
good things of earth. It was characteristic of the early New Englanders to 
make much of little things. The housewife was rightfully proud of her simple 
but nice cooking, and her husband of his plain but substantial produce. There 
is something appetizing in the very thought of their homely but choice dishes, 
their hasty-pudding, their Yankee breads, their pumpkin and mince pies. These 
simple people cultivated to an unsurpassed extent the wholesome pleasure 




ol.l) FRENCH HOUSE. 



HOUSEHOLD INDUSTRIES. 



109 



which comes from a full appreciation of nature's wealth of gifts. They were 
lovers and cultivators of the wholesome fruits. It was a custom often observed 
in New England to give a favorite tree or bush a special and appropriate name, 
as a token of affection and so to make it seem the more companionable. The 
Puritan, indeed, had strong local affections and attachments. He found his 
pleasures in what came to his hand and made pleasures often out of the work he 
had to do. He provided little that was even amusement for his children, but 
this misfortune was alleviated by the abundant outlet for youthful energies 
which they found in the activities of the household. There was little time which 
could be spent in mere amusement. The home was a hive of busy workers. 
The planting, cultivating and harvesting of his crops consumed perhaps the 
smaller portion of the farmer's time. Cattle raising for the West Indies and 
sheep growing took much of his 
attention. He was something 
of a lumberman, as well, and 
still more of a mechanic. Per- 
haps he bought iron rods and, 
when debarred from outdoor 
labor, hammered them into nails 
at the kitchen fireside. It was 
much more important, however, 
that he should have some skill 
at carpentry. Often too, he 
carved out of wood his table 
dishes. In the diverse indus- 
tries of his house was the germ 
of many a nucleus factory. From 
his wife's busy loom came home- 
spun cloth for the family. In the kitchen were distilled her favorite remedies. 
The children of the family were not only kept busy ; they were kept thinking ; 
their inventive faculties were constantly on the alert. Hardly a week passed 
but a new device was needed. Early in the history of New England, to be 
sure, there were tanners who would keep half the skins they received and 
return the other half in leather, brickmakers, masons, carpenters, millers 
with very busy wind-mills, curriers, sawyers, smiths, fullers, malsters, shoe- 
makers, wheelwrights, weavers and other artisans to do the work of specialists 
in the community, yet the farmer did not a little for himself in every one of 
these trades. His home was an industrial community in and of itself. 

The fisherman who dwelt upon the sea-coast needed quite as active and 
versatile a family as did his inland brother. He left them to build the boats, 
hoop the casks, forge the irons, and manage the many other industries pre- 




SILK-WINDIN''.. 



no THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

requisite to the complete outfit of a vessel for a long and hazardous voyage. 
At any time they might be obliged to support themselves entirely or be thrown 
upon the town, for all fishing out at sea is a dangerous vocation, and whaling had 
its peculiar perils. Occasionally a boat and crew were sunk by the tremendous 
blows with which some great whale lashed the sea in his death agony. Now and 
then one of these tormented giants would turn madly upon his pursuers. Then, 
so says one careful historian, "he attacked boats, deliberately, crushing them 
like egg-shells, killing and destroying whatever his massive jaws seized in their 
horrid nip. His rage was as tremendous as his bulk ; when will brought a purpose 
to his movement, the art of man was no match for the erratic creature." One 
such fighting monster attacked the good ship "Essex," striking with his head 
just forward of her fore-chains. The ship, says the mate, "brought up as sud- 
denly and violently as if she had struck a rock, and trembled for a few seconds 
like a leaf." She had already begun to settle when the whale came again, 
crashing with his head through her bows. There was bare time to provision and 
man the small boats before the vessel sank. The crew suffered from long 
exposure and severe privations, and only a part of them were ever saved. 

Such tales as this reached inland and attracted boyish lovers of adventure 
to the sea. There were other and different tales of the sea, as well, to allure 
them — tales of great wealth amassed in the India trade, of prizes captured from 
the French by audacious privateersmen, or of pirates, then scourging the sea, or, 
more boldly still, entering Boston harbor and squandering their ill-gotten gains 
at the Boston taverns. The ocean was then the place for the brave and the 
ambitious. It is a significant fact that probably the first book of original fiction 
ever published in New England was "The Algerine Captive," a story of a 
sailor's slavery among the Moors. Yet this story was long in coming. New 
England produced no fiction of its own and reprinted little of old England's 
until ten years after the close of the American Revolution. In the early farm- 
houses, the library consisted of two or three shelves of Puritan theology. As 
time went on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a few ecclesiastical and local histories, 
one or more records of witchcraft trials, and some doggerel verse from the New 
England poets were added to the dry and scant supply of reading. Yet the 
enterprising and imaginative reader, though a child, could ferret out not a few 
exciting episodes from such uninviting volumes as Josephus's " History of the 
Jews," or Rev. Mr. Williams's record of Indian Captivity, while by 1720 a few 
of the more fortunate little ones had a printed copy of Mother Goose jingles 
for their amusement. But, although this was all the reading the farmer had — 
for the newspapers were wretched and were seldom seen fifty miles from Bos- 
ton — it must not be supposed that he underestimated the value of books. He 
read far more than the modern farmer does — indeed all he could afford to get 
and had the time for ; the clergy of the time often had substantial libraries of 



THE YOUNG LADY. in 

one or two or even three hundred volumes ; while in the Revolutionary period, 
any young lady in a well-to-do family could easily obtain the best writings of 
Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Thomson, and the other classic writers of the 
eighteenth century. 




ATiewof ' y Industry at ^Ajki> of Canada in makina J>ams to stop y Course of a\S.irulet . in order to form a oreatXake, about w? 
they build their Habitations . To Xffect thij ; they fill faroe Trees utih theirTeeth, in Jiuh a manner as to makc'thcm come Crrj}yJU-u 
tet^to toy y foundation of y pam: they make. Vortar. work up, and finish »' whole with yrreat order and wonderfull Dexlertty . 

to the Water and' the other to^theXand side .Accoro<noToyjt'rench.lecounts 



The Jleai'ers hare two -Doer* to their Xodo 



NIAGARA AND THE BEAVER DAMS. 
rom Moll's "New and Exact Map" sjij.) 



Indeed, the "young lady," as the feature of human society, was not alto- 
gether neglected, even in earlier times. To be sure, she could not dance with- 
out shocking most, if not all, of the community ; she could not act in church 
charades — for all dramatic exhibitions were forbidden by law ; but in the inter- 



H2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

vals between her sewing and her housekeeping cares, she played battledore 
and shuttlecock with her sister or friends, or practised the meeting-house 
tunes on the old-fashioned and quaint spinet or virginal. If she were so 
fortunate as to be born in the eighteenth century instead of the seventeenth, 
she was regularly escorted by her swain to the singing-school, which not 
only furnished training in psalmody, but was the occasion of much social 
companionship among the young people of the village, and of not a little 
match-mak 

These gatherings often started incidentally other intellectual interests 
besides those ol music, and books were discussed and recommended. Here was 







the birth-place of the reading circle and the modern lecture system. Awkward 
and restrained as their society manners were, the Puritans were a social people : 
jealously as they preserved their home-life, they joined quite as readily as do 
modern farmers in general village pleasures. The barn raisings for men. the 
quilting-bees for women and the merry corn-huskings and house-warmings for 
both, were not the only social gatherings of young and old. Every ordination 
or installation of a new minister — it came seldom, to be sure. — was the occasion 
ot feasting and a sociable assembling by the congregation. Training day was 
another time when the township was agog with excitement. Even" male citi- 
zen of the village, from the boy of sixteen to the man of sixty - , was compelled on 
these occasions to shoulder his musket and march in the militia. An awkward 



SCHOOL AXD MEETING HOUSE. 113 

squad of amateur soldiers they were, as they paraded the village, complacent 
and valiant in fair weather, but bedraggled, crestfallen and wofully diminished 
in numbers in wet. Vet the women and children were proud of them and fol- 
lowed along the route. In honor of the occasion special booths were erected 
for the sale of gingerbread and harmless drinks to the on-lookers. The tavern 
too was kept busy, for every settlement of any pretensions had a tavern, where 
the passing traveler might get refreshment for himself and his horse. Here the 
selectmen planned the village policy for the consideration of the town-meeting. 
Here too were held public debates between rival theological disputants, sitting 
over their mild spirituous beverages. Here too was disseminated the latest 
news from Boston and the old world. 

The two other public buildings of the place were the school-house and the 
meeting-house. As early as 1647, every Massachusetts village of fifty house- 
holders was required by state law to maintain a school, in which the catechism 
and the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic should be taught, while 
every town which boasted a hundred householders was obliged to establish a 
grammar school. But New England was not dependent upon these schools 
alone for her education. Massachusetts and Connecticut each had its college, in 
which learned and often eminent men trained the more ambitious youth of the 
land. One hundred thousand graduates were among the early emigrants from 
England and mingled with the people, while in the first days of the church, the 
pulpits even in the smaller towns, were almost without exception filled with men 
accomplished in the best learning of the time. 

The church was the centre of the community's social and political life. 
Attendance on public worship was enforced, during many decades and in many 
places, by village ordinance. Church and state were curiously confused. Only 
church members were allowed to vote at town-meetings, and the selectmen of 
the village assigned the seats to the congregation, according to the peculiar 
regulations of the town-meeting. Customs ' differed in different places. In 
some villages, just before service began, the men would file in on one 
side of the church and the women on the other, while the boys and 
girls, separated from each other as scrupulously, were uncomfortably fixed 
in the gallery, or placed on the gallery stairs, or on the steps leading 
up to the pulpit. It was in one of these churches that the following ordinance 
was enforced : — 

"Ordered that all ye boys of ye town are and shall be appointed to sitt upon ye three pair 
of stairs in ye meeting-house on the Lord's day, and Wm. Lord is appointed to look to the boys 
yt sit upon ye pulpit stairs, and ye other stairs Reuben Guppy is to look 1 

In other meeting-houses, each household had a curious box pew of its own, 
fashioned according to the peculiar tastes of its occupants. The assignment of 

s 



114 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



pew room in these places of worship was determined by the most careful class 
distinctions, for democratic as the Puritans were in their political institutions and 
commercial methods, each family jealously guarded whatever aristocratic pre- 
tensions it might have inherited. To the plain seats in the gallery were relegated 
the humbler members of the parish ; a few young couples had pews of their 
own set off for them there, while a special gallery was occasionally provided for 
the negro slaves. There was no method of heating the edifice ; to warm their 
feet the women had recourse to foot-stoves, carried to the meeting-house by the 
children or apprentices ; the men to the more primitive method of pinching 
their shins together. When the hour-glass in the pulpit had marked the passage 
of an hour and a half, the sermon usually came to a close, and the people in the 




CHAMPLAINS FORTIFIED CAMP; THE FIRST HOUSE ERECTED IN OUEIiKC. 



gallery descended and marched two abreast up one aisle and past the long pew 
which directly faced the pulpit and in which the elders and deacons sat. Here 
was the money-box, into which each person dropped his shilling or more, as the 
case might be, while the line was turning down the other aisle. There was 
an intermission of service at noon, when the people ate their luncheon 
in the adjacent school-house, where a wood-stove could be found, and 
discussed the village gossip and the public notices posted on the meeting- 
house door. 

In every family the minister of the parish was received with an awe and 
reverence which seemed suitable not only to the dignity of his calling, but to 
the extreme gravity of his deportment and the impressive character of his learn- 
ing. In weight and authority he was the peer of the village officials. Only the 



MINISTER AND SQUIRE. 



"5 



squire, the appointee of the Crown, was his superior ; for he held his office as 
representative of the Crown. If offenders did not pay the fines imposed upon 
them, this village dignitary could place them in the stocks, or order them to be 
whipped. Persons who lived disorderly, "misspending their precious time, he 
could send to work-house, to the stocks, or to the whipping-post, at his discre- 
tion. He could break open doors where liquors were concealed to defraud His 
Majesty's excise. He could issue hue-and-cries for runaway servants and 
thieves. There are instances on record in which a justice of the peace issued 




COLONIAL MANSION. RESIDENCE OF THE LATE WILLIAM BULL PRINGLE, ESQ., CHARLESTON, S. C. 



his warrant to arrest the town minister, about whose orthodoxy there were dis- 
tressing rumors, and required him to be examined upon matters of doctrine and 
faith. But a more pleasing function of his office was to marry those who came 
to him for marriage, bringing the town clerk's certificate that their nuptial inten- 
tions had been proclaimed at three religious meetings in the parish during the 
preceding fortnight." 

The Squire's office, however, was an English, not an American institution, 
and did not long survive on our soil. What was peculiar to New England public 
life was the town meeting, held in the parish church. Every freeman of the 



n6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

township was obliged to attend it, under penalty of a fine. It distributed in 
early days the land among the settlers ; it regulated, .often according to com- 
munistic and often according to protectionist principles, the industries of the 
community ; and it repressed gay fashions and undue liberties in speech and 
deportment. Its representatives were the selectmen and town-clerk, and were 
held in high esteem, from the respect due to their office. 

Yet none of these dignitaries, much as they were held in awe, could per- 
manently suppress the instincts of youth for gayer fashions and happier times. 
It is impossible on any rational basis to explain the inconsistent Puritan standards 
of right and wrong amusements. The most conscientious of Puritans would go, 
merely out of curiosity, to a hanging, and see no harm in it, but he looked with 
grave suspicion on church chimes as a worldly frivolity. Feasting he encouraged 
and religious services he discouraged at a funeral. Marriage he made a secular 
function ; the franchise religious. To dancing he objected as improper and to 
card-playing as dangerous, but he saw no harm in kissing-games and lotteries. 
Finally the influence of the city proved too much for him. Boston customs were 
imitated in the provincial towns. Young and old indulged in the fashionable 
disfigurements of the day. The women wore black patches on their faces to set 
off their complexions and the men slashed the sleeves of their coats to show the 
fine quality of their underclothes, and even funeral services became occasions 
for display. Sumptuary laws were ignored or repealed. The country towns 
became social centres. By the time of the American Revolution, New England 
was already merging from Puritanism, with its virtues and limitations, into a new 
Americanism, with its new merits and its new defects. 




CHAPTER VI. 

THE BUCCANEERS AND PIRATES OE AMERICA. 

the north of Cuba, between that island and the Great 

Bahama banks is a navigable channel known as the old 

Bahama passage. Three centuries ago it had its day, a rich 

day, when freighted Spanish merchantmen and galleons, 

seeking in the new world the riches which impoverished Spain 

grasped so eagerly for, "dropped down with costly bales" 

from Cuba and the American coast, finding their way by the 

Caicos passage to the ocean. 

Between Cuba and Haiti, or Hispaniola, is what is known as "the 

windward passage," almost at the intersection of which with the Bahama 

channel, at the northwest end of Haiti, is Tortuga del Mar, — the sea tortoise. 

As it was described in the sixteenth century, so it is to-day, — a wooded, 
rocky island, with few inhabitants and much game. Its only good harbor is on 
the south, and the blue water that surrounds it is as clear as a mountain spring 
and deeper than the mountain itself. It covers the entrance to the little for- 
tified Haitian town of Port au Paix, with a strait ten miles wide between them. 
With its beauty of foliage, mild, sea-tempered, tropical climate, and advantage of 
position, nature evidently intended Tortuga for a little insular heaven, but man 
succeeded in making quite the reverse of it. On Tortuga the Buccaneers 
(formerly known as Boucaniers and Buccaniers) started and developed, till 
Spain rang with the terror and fame of their achievements, and throughout 
the Antilles and the Spanish Main they enacted one of the most terrific 
romances of history. 

Boucaning, from which we get Buccanier, originally meant to prepare beef 
in a peculiar way, by smoking ; and the Buccaneers were cow-boys, who were a 
part of the French settlement that had driven the Spanish owners from Tortuga. 
The horses and cattle of the latter, running wild in large droves, afforded the 
material for their adventurous trade. It was not long before these old time 
" cowpunchers" became a separate and peculiar people, living much of their 
lives in camp, and returning to town only to dispose of their spoils and to 
commit untold debaucheries. Spain, in possession of Hispaniola, naturally was 

117 



i iS THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

jealous of her interloping French neighbors. France disclaimed any responsi- 
bility tor their acts, on the ground that she neither governed nor received 
tribute in Tortuga. Then the Spaniards tried to eject the Buccaneers, and only 
succeeded in incurring their undying enmity. At last a destruction of cattle 
drove the Frenchmen to more desperate adventures. 

The first departure was that of Pierre Le Grand, who, tired of the waning 
activity of the beef business, took a small vessel, and with twenty-eight men, 
cruised towards Caicos, with the purpose of surprising some Spanish merchant- 
man. Finally discovering a war vessel, instead of such game as he was in 
search of, this Peter the Great approached to examine his prey more closely, 
and succeeded in exciting the suspicions of some of the Spaniards on board of 
the stranger, who told their captain that they believed the little vessel to be a 
pirate ; but the commander, who was vice-admiral of the Spanish fleet, laughed 
at their anxiety, replying that even if the Frenchman was near their own 
vessel's size they would have nothing to fear. 

Waiting till cover of evening, the Buccaneers approached so close to the 
Spaniard that they could not have withdrawn without discovery and suspicion. 
In order to insure success, Pierre made the pirates' chances desperate by 
scuttling his own vessel ; thereupon they closed with the man-of-war and 
boarded her with such adroitness and celerity that they succeeded in surprising 
the captain and some of his officers in the cabin, and, after a short struggle, 
shooting down those that opposed them, possessed themselves of the gun 
room. It was an easy but brilliant victory, an achievement that set the hot 
blood of the Tortuga Buccaneers in a sudden blaze, and freebooting on the 
high seas became at once a fashionable and much-followed profession. As for 
Pierre le Grand, the pioneer in piracy, he was content with his first venture, 
and, having taken his rich prize to France, remained there, never revisiting the 
Western World. Doubtless the Spaniards passing Cape de Alvarez in their 
little tobacco boats, or hide-laden vessels from Havana, were surprised and, 
not pleasantly so, by the sudden appearance and activity of canoes and small 
boats manned with murderous Frenchmen from Tortuga. 

The Buccaneer was beginning his trade of piracy in a small way, 
ndustriously accumulating the capital with which to venture on greater 
enterprises. The small vessels he converted into little freebooting ships ; the 
small cargoes he took home and sold in Tortuga, till he had enough saved to 
equip them properly. When everything was ready, and agreements as to the 
share of each man had been entered into, and every man had chosen his side 
partner, who should share his good and evil fortune and stand by him in a 
fracas, the notice was given to assemble. Whereupon every pirate brought 
his powder and arms to the appointed place, and off they went. That was the 
fashion of it. As we would plan a little jaunt down the river, or across the 



DEEDS OF DARING. 119 

lake, or up to the top of a mountain to see the moon rise, these jolly 
Buccaneers got ready and went a-pirating. 

Let us not be misled at the outset by a glamour of romance which time and 
a partial historian have thrown about the deeds of the buccaneers. No more 
utterly debased, bestial, merciless, and bloodthirsty set of fiends ever figured 
in history ; but it is no less true that their physical fearlessness led them to deeds 
which, by their audacity and atrocity, set the world ringing with their fame. 

The first four great prizes were made within a month. Two of these were 
Spanish merchantmen and two were vessels loaded with plate at Campeche. 
Success so great, the proofs of which were at once brought to Tortuga, as to 
arouse the wildest enthusiasm. In a little time there were twenty vessels in 
the buccaneer Meet. Spain, disgusted at this new state of affairs, sent two 
men-of-war to guard her shipping. It is impossible to say how much more 
mischief might have been done had it not been for this precaution. As it was, 
the commerce of His Most Catholic Majesty suffered frightfully. 

A second Pierre, called Francois, led a crew of twenty-six men in a little 
vessel against the pearl fleet, near the river De La Plata, where they lay at work 
under the protection of a gun-boat. The man-of-war was barely half a league 
away from the fleet, but Francois' resolved to attempt a swoop. He feigned to 
be a Spanish vessel coming up the coast from Maracaibo. On reaching the fleet 
he assaulted the vessel of the vice-admiral, of eight guns and sixty men, and 
forced a surrender. He then resolved to take the man-of-war. So he sunk his 
own boat and, compelling the Spaniards to assist him, set sail in the prize, with 
Spanish colors flying. Thinking that some of the sailors were trying to run 
away with what they had got, the man-of-war gave chase. This did not suit 
Francois at all. It is one thing to fight a surprised and unsuspecting enemy, and 
quite another to combat a foe that greatly outweighs and outmeasures one's self 
when he is suspicious and advancing. Francois tried to get away. That he 
would have succeeded in escaping had his rigging stood, there is little doubt. 
As it was the mainmast gave way under the sudden strain of canvas, and the 
freebooters were at the mercy of their enemy. On being overhauled Francois 
and his men — twenty-two of whom could fight — made a fierce resistance, but 
were at length overcome, but only yielded on favorable terms, which were that 
they were to be put, uninjured, on shore, on free land. 

It is estimated that the booty which they obtained and lost that day was 
worth about 100,000 pistoles, or about $400,000. 

In course of time, and no very long time, Port Royal, in Jamaica, became 
the chief rendezvous for the pirates. On the harbor where Kingston now 
stands there is a little town to remind one of the city that was engulfed by the 
great earthquake — a city said to be the wickedest in the world. Near Port 
Royal, upon the same harbor, is a landing by which one could go, and still 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



can, by a short cut of half a dozen miles, to the capital city, Santiago de la 
Vega, now known as Spanish-Town. Near this landing there are large caverns 
and fissures of enormous depth, into which one may cast a stone and hear it 
bound and rebound, till the sound is lost in the distance. These caverns, 
tradition says, were the hiding places and silent accomplices in murder of the 
Buccaneers when they were hard pressed. Some are still supposed to contain 

vast treasure. 

Attracted by the 
great success of the 
Frenchmen, accessions 
from English, Portuguese, 
and Dutch mariners joined 
the ranks of those who 
preyed upon Spanish com- 
merce. Nearly always the 
buccaneers appear to have 
sailed under some semi- 
official letters of marque 
granted by the colonial 
governors. 

Bartholomew Portu- 
gues, a man of cat-like 
cunning, courage, and 
ferocity, was among the 
first to arrive. He had 
been a noted desperado 
in the old world before 
he ventured his fortunes 
in the new. With a small 
vessel, about thirty men, 
and four small cannon, he 
attacked a large Spaniard 
running from Maracaibo 
to Havana, and after being once repulsed succeeded in taking her. Her force 
of men was more than double his own, and her armament vastly larger, 
but she finally struck her flag to the pirate, who had lost ten or twelve 
men. Being bothered by head winds, Portugues sailed for a cape on the west 
end of Cuba, to repair and take in supplies. Just as he rounded the cape, he 
ran into the midst of three large Spanish vessels, by whom he was taken. 
Shortly afterward a storm arose and separated the ships, but the one which 
bore th<- desperado put into Campeche, where he was recognized by some 





XHOLOMEUSbePORTUGEES 

Jiecft- -yan ccn party fratw-c 
en EnfeUc ioww. 



czschc Zee Roove 



BRAZILIANO. 121 

Spaniards who had suffered at his hands in other waters. He was condemned 
without trial, to be hung at daybreak, and for safe keeping was confined that 
night on the ship ; but having a friend and accomplice near, he procured a knife, 
murdered his guard and escaped to land, floating on earthen wine jars, for he 
could not swim. Hiding in the woods for three days without food other than 
that the forest afforded, the pirate saw the parties sent in search of him, 
and afterward traveled nearly forty leagues, living on what he could glean on 
the shore, and exposed to all the discomforts, which only those who have 
traveled in a tropical country can at all appreciate. On his journey he 
performed, it is said, a remarkable feat which illustrated his tenacity of 
purpose, and power of will. Coming to a considerable river and being unable 
to cross it by swimming, he shaped rude knives from some great nails which 
he found attached to a piece of wreckage on the shore, and with no other 
instrument, cut branches with which he constructed a sort of boat. When 
he reached Golfo Triste and found there others of his own kidney, he told 
them of his sufferings and adventures and begged a small boat and twenty men 
with which to return to Campeche. 

In the meantime the Spaniards, having supposed their foe dead, made a 
great rejoicing, which was summarily cut short by his unexpected return. In 
the dead of night he encountered the very vessel which had lately captured 
him, and from which he had escaped. She was lying in the mouth of the river. 

Softly the pirates steal across the starlit water, slipping from shadow to 
shadow along the shore, starting at the whistle of the duck or the hoarse cry 
of the flamingo, till they are in position to pounce upon their prey. Then 
a sudden dash, a few shots and groans, and Portugues is again the successful 
Buccaneer, the master of a rich prize. 

But he did not keep it long. He was wrecked on his way to Jamaica, and 
returned to that evil place as empty as when he started out, and although he 
engaged in several expeditions and made brilliant efforts to regain his 
advantages he never did so, but was always followed by the ill fortune he so 
richly deserved. 

Braziliano — a Dutchman, long resident in Brazil — had his share of 
notoriety. He won a rich prize or two and spent his money so recklessly that 
a fortune slipped through his fingers in three months. At this time Port Royal 
was so choicely wicked that only the quaint chronicler of three hundred years 
ago would dare to put in words the details of its debauchery, and only in the 
old fashioned style of that early day would the account be readable. Literally, 
wine flowed in the streets like water, was thrown over the persons of passers 
by, who were ordered, at the pistol mouth, to partake. Murder, lust, and 
drunkenness, in forms indescribably beyond all precedent or comparison, were 
the order of the day. And this tremendous reputation for crime and 



122 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

debauchery, that is pre-eminent after the lapse of centuries, was won in less 
than half a generation. 

After a little the Spaniards, grown wary, were too well convoyed and 
armed to be easy conquests, and a new era was inaugurated. Lewis Scott was 
the first of the Buccaneers to attempt the adventures upon land which added 
so greatly to the fame of the freebooters. He attacked and almost destroyed 
the town of Campeche. His example incited the Dutchman, Mansvelt, who 
invaded Grenada, the island of St. Catherine, which he took, and which was for 
some time a pirate rendezvous, and Carthagena. 

Nor must we forget John Davis, whose fame is only second to that of 
Morgan himself. Davis was a Jamaican by birth. His first great exploit was 
the sack of Nicaragua. He had in all iorty men, of whom he left ten to guard 
the vessel, and with the remainder, in three boats, approached the city. 

Sending a captive Indian slave in advance to murder the sentry, the party 
landed and went from house to house, knocking and entering, putting the in- 
mates to death and looting all they could lay their hands on. They pillaged 
the churches and took prisoners for ransom, escaping when the hue and cry 
was raised, and the uproar in the suddenly awakened city taught them that it 
was time to retreat. The Spaniards followed them to the seashore, but too late 
to recover their townsmen or treasure, though not too late to receive a warm 
parting salute from the guns of the pirate. The value of booty acquired on 
this raid is said to have exceeded $300,000 in gold, besides much plate and 
jewels — probably all told reaching $75,000 more. We next learn of Davis as 
the commander of a Meet of half a dozen or more pirate vessels, and among 
other adventures is that of the capture of St. Augustine, Florida. 

LOLOXnlS AND HIS ADVENTURES. 

The plans and exploits of the pirates continued to grow in magnitude. 
Their vessels became fleets and their fleets almost navies. One of the great 
leaders was Lolonois, who began in the early days of buccaneering on Tortuga, 
and rose to be a freebooter of great prominence and reputation. The Gov- 
ernor of Tortuga, Monsieur de la Place, was so struck with his qualities that he 
gave him his first ship. He so beset the Spaniards in her that it is said by his 
biographer that " the Spaniards, in his time, would rather die fighting than 
surrender, knowing they should have no mercy at his hands." 

He gained great wealth, but after awhile lost his ship on the coast of Cam- 
peche, where he and his crew, after escaping from the wreck, were beset and 
almost destroyed by the Spaniards. Lolonois himself, being wounded, feigned 
death and was passed over by his foes. Afterwards escaping, by the aid of 
some negroes to whom he made great promises, the captain got back to Tor- 
tuga, and after some trouble succeeded in getting another vessel and crew 



LOLONOIS AND HIS ADVENTURES. 



12 3 



With these he put into the port of Cayos, and learning the channel from some 
captive fishermen, lay in wait for a vessel which the governor oi Cuba sent to 
capture him. After nightfall, while the vessel lay at anchor, several boats 
approached her, and were hailed with the inquiry whether they had seen any 
pirates. The fishermen in the boat replied that they had not. But beside the 
fishermen were pirates, compelling- them to answer so. Thereupon the boats 
drew nearer, and presently the Buccaneers assaulted, swarming up both sides 
of the great vessel and 
forced the Spaniards be- 
low hatches. From below 
decks they were ordered 
out one by one and deca- 
pitated at Lolonois' order. 
One man alone was saved, 
to bear a message back 
to the governor, to the 
effect that the pirate cap- 
tain would never spare 
any Spaniard thereafter, 
and hoped shortly to make 
an end of the governor 
himself. 

While cruising in this 
ship, another vessel was 
taken near Maracaibo — a 
ship loaded with plate and 
merchandise. With this 
Lolonois returned to Tor- 
tuga to receive the con- 
gratulations and praise 
that usually await the suc- 
cessful. 

His next venture was 
with eight vessels, ten guns 
and nearly seven hundred men. His first prize was a ship of sixteen guns with 
fifty fighting men on board. She yielded after hot fighting for three hours, 
the flag-ship of the pirate fleet having engaged her singly without assistance 
from the others. She contained, besides a rich cargo, a treasure of over fifty 
thousand pistoles, of $200,000 in value. Other prizes soon put the fleet in a 
position to attempt more extensive operations. 

The Gulf of Venezuela or Bay of Maracaibo, as it was called, afforded a 




the Portrait 



nsche Zee Roove 



I2 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

peculiarly tempting field for the freebooter, Lolonois. Its narrow channel, 
protected by the watch tower and fortress on the islands at its mouth, led to a 
lake near which the Spaniards had settled several towns and cities, whose wealth 
came to be quite disproportioned to their size or populations. Maracaibo, 
Gibralter, Merida — all had much to recommend them to the hungry pirate. 
One can hardly understand at first how so much silver and other valuable 
booty could have been gathered from the insignificant settlements of the 
Spanish Main ; but when we consider that from Peru and the Pacific settlements 
to the islands of the Caribbean there was almost constant communication, that 
the inhabitants of all were reaping the full advantage of being first in a rich 
treasure field, and that there were no banks, each man holding or hoarding 
his own gains and keeping his capital under his own roof, the mystery grows 
less. 

To Maracaibo Lolonois shaped his fleet's course. Arriving at the entrance, 
he landed and took the fort or earthworks by storm, in a fight which lasted for 
several hours, then, sailing through the passage, brought his whole fleet into 
the lake and towards Maracaibo, which lay about six leagues beyond. Becalmed 
in sight of the town, the inhabitants saw the fleet and had time to flee with much 
of their treasure towards Gibralter. But on the following day the invaders landed 
and Lolonois sent a company of men into the woods to follow the fugitives, 
whose houses, with stores of food and drink, stood open. By the time the search 
party returned with such prisoners and booty as they could recover, the remain- 
der of the crews were not of the soberest, as might be imagined. Then began 
one of those revolting scenes of cruelty and crime, the details of which we follow 
shudderingly. Men were tortured in every conceivable way, their limbs broken, 
their bodies mutilated, their most sacred feelings outraged, to force them to a 
confession of hidden riches. Many a poor wretch died under the torments 
inflicted, protesting with his dying breath that he could not reveal what he had 
never known. For fifteen days Maracaibo was occupied, till like a lemon whose 
juice is exhausted and the rind flung away, it was abandoned and the murderers 
proceeded towards Gibralter, which was a smaller town than Maracaibo, but in 
communication with Merida, to which place the pirates advanced last, after having 
treated Gibralter as they had Maracaibo. The governor of Merida, who had 
been a soldier in Flanders and who made no cloubt that he could hold his own 
in a fight with the freebooters, barricaded the roads, felled trees in the passages 
through the swamps and planted batteries where they would be of most avail. 
Over these obstructions Lolonois and his men were obliged to fight their way 
step by step, now taking the woods and anon the road, but swearing with curses 
loud and deep that the Spaniards would have to pay for their discomfiture. It 
came near being a defeat for the buccaneers, as they were outnumbered and 
overmatched, and would probably have been totally destroyed, or at least have 



MORGAN, THE PRINCE OF BUCCANEERS. 125 

escaped only with severe loss, but for a very old stratagem. Pretending to flee, 
they drew the enemy from one of his strongest batteries, and then turning, 
overpowered and defeated him. 

After Merida had been taken and new cruelties devised for its suffering 
inhabitants the captors rested there four weeks, until the increasing death-rate 
among them warned them to escape from a climate to which their excesses 
made them easy victims. Sending parties then into the woods for those who 
had still preserved their lives there, the pirate captain demanded a ransom for 
the town, promising to burn it to the ground if 10,000 pistoles were not imme- 
diately forthcoming. Finally this sum was secured, but only after part of 
Merida had been consumed with fire. A similar ransom was extorted from the 
already exhausted Maracaibo as the fleet passed out of the gulf, and then the 
buccaneers sailed away, having 260,000 pistoles in ready money and an immense 
booty in merchandise. 

It would be impossible and not very instructive to follow Lolonois through 
his further adventures. He sacked many cities, killed and tortured numberless 
Spaniards, won and wasted an almost countless treasure, and at last died a 
miserable death of lingering torture at the hands of some enraged Indians. 

Following Lolonois came Henry Morgan, the last and greatest of the 
Buccaneers, whose crimes and adventures have made him, in the popular 
conception a sort of nautical demi-god ; only second in fame to Sir Francis 
Drake, and much greater in exploits. 

Without question, Morgan was a remarkable man. A Welsh boy, sold for 
his passage to the New World, after the fashion of those days, he was a naval 
commander who belonged to no navy, a conqueror to whom conquest and 
pillage were equal terms, a genius in murder and robbery. He commanded at 
times many ships and hundreds of pirates, yet was one of those instrumental in 
putting down piracy. He was utterly lawless, yet always claimed that he sailed 
under commission from the Governor of Jamaica. He was knighted for one of 
his most outrageous acts of piracy at a time when the Governor who had given 
him his commission was in prison for doing so. He was Acting-Governor of 
the very island where most of the fruits of his lawlessness had been exhibited, 
and where he was said to have wisely maintained the laws. He became a 
planter of wealth and repute, and finally languished in an English prison for 
the crimes so long condoned. Certainly, romance need not seek further than 
this for material. 

One of Morgan's earliest exploits was the taking of Puerto Bello, in Costa 
Rica. This he effected partly by stratagem, causing the sentry to be seized 
and approaching the strong walls of the city under cover of darkness. He also 
managed to surprise the inmates of some religious houses, priests and nuns, 
whom he afterwards put forward as a defense to his soldiers when scaling 



126 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ladders were brought into use. But never was a more obstinate defense made 
and never was Henry Morgan more nearly defeated than that day at Puerto 
Bello. The Spaniards fought with fury, the Governor especially showing no 
mercy and finally refusing all quarter, dying with his sword in his hand, crying 
that he would rather fall a soldier than live a coward. 

St. Catherine's Island was taken by Morgan, to be used as a pirate ren- 
dezvous, but the Governor of that place, while agreeing to capitulate before a 
blow had been struck, insisted on a sham battle to save his credit. To this 
Morgan good-naturedly acceded. Following the example of Lolonois and 
others, he attacked ill-fated Maracaibo and put the inhabitants to torture worse 
than that which they had before suffered. We will not go into details, having 
already supped on horrors. More interesting is the account of the dilemma 
in which the buccaneer found himself upon seeking to leave the Gulf of Vene- 
zuela with his ships loaded with booty and prisoners. He had eight little 
vessels. He found opposing him several war ships in the narrow passage 
already so well guarded by the guns of the fortress on the island. The Admiral 
of the Spanish fleet sent a letter to Morgan telling him that he might be 
allowed to escape on condition of leaving all his plunder behind, but that other- 
wise he would be treated without mercy. 

The Buccaneer might have said, as General Sheridan is reported to have 
said on a much later occasion, "I am in a bottle and the enemy have the neck 
of it." However, he made a bold front and resolved to perish in fighting his 
way out rather than abandon his ill-gotten gains. By means of a fire ship, 
cunningly manned and armed with dummies, he managed to deceive and 
destroy the largest of the Spanish ships and then defeated the others. This 
accomplished, he waited for a favorable opportunity to pass the fort, the guns 
of which still pointed too ominously across the exit. 

The question was how to turn those guns the other way. Finally he hit 
upon a scheme. Sending boat after boat to the shore filled with men and return- 
ing apparently empty to the ships, but in reality with their crews lying covered 
in the bottoms, he deceived the Spaniards into believing that he meditated a 
night attack on the fort from the landward side. In consequence all the great 
guns were turned that way, in expectation. Then the crafty captain stood out 
to sea, firing a salute of bullets, to which the disgusted garrison did not attempt 
to reply. 

When Morgan had reduced Puerto Bello he had a passage of arms with 
the Governor of Panama, who had come vainly to the relief of that place. A 
little bit of theatrical civility or courtesy took place at the time, the Governor 
sending a message to Morgan, to know by what arms he had succeeded in 
overcoming so strong a fortress ; and the captain politely returning a pistol and 
bullets with a message to the effect that he would come for them in a year. 





vJHR 



,j 






I - 






HtH 



^^^^gj 



128 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



After a while Morgan went for that pistol. This was in 1670. Sending 
some vessels in advance, which took the town of Chagres, the leader presently 
came and led them across the Isthmus, where they met with almost unbearable 
hardships on the march. It was the month of August. A little army of twelve 

hundred men, with artillery 
and ammunition, pushed on 
foot across a country where 
men have since ridden and 
thought it hardship. They 
had no food ; the fatigue was 
great; hostile Indians added 
their unwelcome addresses 
to the pangs of starvation ; 
yet the intrepid pirates kept 
on as though they expected 
in some way to be miracu- 
lously saved from the death 
that in different disguises 
peered at them from the 
ambushes along the way. 
One would suppose that 
their ardor would have been 
tamed ; but on the contrary, 
when they came in sight 
of Panama, these irrepressi- 
ble freebooters cheered and 
threw up their hats as 
though they had been out 
for a holiday. This was on 
the ninth or tenth day of 
the march. Almost within 
sight of the city they found 
food, which they devoured 
like wild beasts. They had 
one or two skirmishes, and 
at last were rejoiced to see 
a company of the Spaniards coming to meet them. These men, who were 
mounted, came near enough to call names and shout unpleasant things to them, 
but soon retired and left the way clear to the city. But Morgan, a schemer 
himself, feared an ambuscade. He made a detour to avoid the batteries which 
he judged rightly, the enemy had put in the way. Then the Spaniards left 




BLACKBEARD, THE PIRATE. 



KIDD AND BLACK BEARD. 



129 



these works and came to meet him. There were four regiments of foot, a 
body of horse and a large number of wild bulls that were driven by Indians. 
There was something humorous in the idea of 
sending cattle against buccaneers ; but there was 




DIGGING I I IS Kll Hi ^ I K!- WUI- - 



very little military judgment in it, as 
the sequel showed. The bulls ran away. The Spanish forces, nearly if not 
quite three thousand strong, were vanquished after a sanguinary battle, and the 



ijo THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

city of Panama was taken and looted, after which Captain Morgan put it to 
the torch. 

Two churches, eight monasteries, two hundred warehouses, and a great 
number of residences were the prizes which this richest of American cities 
offered. They were all utterly stripped, and the usual tortures resorted to in 
order to extort confessions concerning the treasure which might possibly be 
hidden. People were burned alive, eyes dug out, ears and noses cut off, arms 
dislocated, and all imagined or unheard-of barbarities practiced. Then the 
greatest of all pirates and freebooters went away with a hundred and seventy 
beasts laden with precious metals and jewels and merchandise of value, besides 
six hundred prisoners. He made, when he reached the coast, a false division 
of spoils among his men, and escaping with the lion's share abjured piracy 
and became, as has been before said, a knight of Charles the Second's creation, 
and an exemplary planter and Governor of the island of Jamaica ! 

We have dwelt long, — too long, — with the Buccaneers. There were other 
pirates of a later time whose names are not less familiar, and one at least of the 
number whose fame is world wide. I mean Captain Kidd, who stood upon 
a sort of middle ground between the buccaneers and the marooners proper. 
Teach, or Blackbeard, made his headquarters among the Bahama Islands and 
was a past-master of claptrap. He created theatrical effects with burned brim- 
stone and paint, and not only tortured others but himself as well, giving us 
every reason to believe him an insane man. That he took and buried treasure 
at different points is certain, and probably the half of his villanies have never 
been told. But of Blackbeard and Avery and Roberts we can say very little ; 
they were roaring, ranting, raving pirates, per sc. Their stories lack the flavor 
of courage and dash of romance that make us willing to endure the recital of 
the crimes of Morgan, Lolonois or the rest of the Buccaneers. 

But we may not leave Kidd so. Along every mile of Atlantic coast in the 
United States his money has been dreamed about and often searched for. The 

story of how he 

•• Murdered William More 
And left him in his gore 
As he sailed," 

is part of our nursery education. 

There were pirates troubling the shipping of the very good Dutch-English 
town of New York long ago, and some very good and very rich merchants 
obtained a commission from Lord Bellamont for William Kidd to go out and 
look for pirates, which he did, and found one. 

It was a little hard on the respectable merchants aforementioned, that they 
should have been suspected by an envious world of sharing in the profits of the 
piratical voyages. More was a gunner, or gunner's mate, whom Captain Kidd 



THE MAROONERS. 



131 



put to death ; and it is one of the curious examples of the working of law that 
Kidd after his capture would have escaped under a general amnesty to pirates 
had he not been held on the charge of murder. He enjoyed the unenviable dis- 
tinction of being the one of very few pirates who have been hung. 

But, nevertheless, though the fame of Kidd and Morgan is so pre-eminent, 
there are others only second to 
them in renown — others whose 
names and deeds have also been 
chronicled by Captain Johnson, the 
famous historian of scoundreldom. 
Captain Bartholomew Roberts, for 
instance, if he may not have had 
the fortune to be so famous as the 
two above-mentioned worthies, yet. 
in his marvelous escapes and deeds 
of daring, he well deserves to stand 
upon the same pedestal of renown. 
And Captain Avery, though his his- 
tory is, perhaps, more apocryphal 
in its nature, nevertheless there is 
sufficient stamina of trust in the 
account of his exploits to grant him 
also a place with his more famous 
brothers, for the four together — 
Blackbeard, Kidd, Roberts, and 
Avery — form a galaxy the like of 
which is indeed hard to match in 
its own peculiar brilliancy. 

Through circumstances the 
hunter name of buccaneers was 
given to the seventeenth century 
pirates and freebooters ; the term 
" marooners " was bestowed upon 
those who followed the same trade 
in the century succeeding. The name has in itself a terrible significance. The 
dictionary tells us that to maroon is to put ashore as upon a desert island, and 
it was from this that the title was derived. 

These later pirates, the marooners, not being under the protection of the 
West Indian Governors, and having no such harbor for retreat as that, for 
instance, of Port Royal, were compelled to adopt some means for the disposal of 
prisoners captured with their prizes other than taking them into a friendly port. 




CAPTAIN liARTHnl iiMl-u Knl:KKIs. 



132 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Occasionally such unhappy captives were set adrift in the ship's boats — with 
or without provisions, as the case might be. A method of disposing of them, 
maybe more convenient, certainly more often used, was to set them ashore upon 
some desert coast or uninhabited island, with a supply of water perhaps, and 
perhaps a gun, a pinch of powder, and a few bullets — there to meet their fate, 
either in the slim chance of a passing vessel or more probably in death. 

Nor was marooning the fate alone of the wretched captives of their piracy ; 
sometimes it was resorted to as a punishment among themselves. Many a 
mutinous pirate sailor and not a few pirate captains have been left to the horrors 
of such a fate, either to die under the shriveling glare of the tropical sun upon 
some naked sand-spit or to consume in the burning of a tropical fever amid the 
rank wilderness of mangroves upon some desert coast. 

Hence the name marooners. 

The Tudor sea-captains were little else than legalized pirates, and in them 
we may see that first small step that leads so quickly into the smooth down- 
ward path. The buccaneers, in their semi-legalized piracy, succeeded them as 
effect follows cause. Then, as the ultimate result, followed the marooners — 
fierce, bloody, rapacious, human wild beasts, lusting for blood and plunder, 
godless, lawless, the enemy of all men but their own wicked kind. 

Is there not a profitable lesson to be learned in the history of such a human 
extreme of evil — all the more wicked from being the rebound from civilization ? 

Even to this day imaginative fishermen and oystermen on Connecticut 
and Long Island shores occasionally see a phantom ship sailing, with all sail set, 
across some neck of land ; and more than one will tell how he started to dig for 
a treasure, and was driven away by having the pirate vessel bear down upon 
him, which eoes to show that once in awhile fiction is stranger than fact. 



CHAPTER VII. 



CUTTING LOOSE ER.OIV1 EUROPE. 




ONE SIXTH OFA SPANISH 

MUl'd Dollar-orlhcVallW 
thereof in GolclorSilver 
laic given in exchange at 
Treasury of VlRGiyjA, 
Pursuant to A. C T qf 

ASSEMBLY 




VIRGINIACURRENC 



THE causes which made 
possible the assertion of 
American National Inde- 
pendence must be sought, 
not merely in the oppres- 
sive legislation which 
directly harried the colon- 
ists into revolt, but, back 
of that, in the political 
institutions they had 
evolved for themselves ; in 
the self-dependence made 
necessary by the distance 
and indifference of the 
mother country ; in the inherited instinct for self-government common to all of 
the English race ; in their ardor for commercial and territorial expansion, and 
in the occasional and temporary unity of action to which they were from time 
to time forced for mutual defense against a common enemy. 

When the struggle which ended in the Revolution began, the thirteen 
colonies were, as regards internal affairs, to all ends and purposes representative 
democracies. All of them elected legislatures, which made laws, laid taxes, 
levied troops, provided for grants, and formed a real government of the people 
by the people. Two of the colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, held 
charters which allowed them to choose their own Governors as well. So com- 
plete were these two charter-grants that when the Union was formed no change 
was needed in the political structure of the two States ; and, in fact, no change 
was made for many years. Massachusetts originally held an equally liberal 
charter, but was deprived of it by an arbitrary act of the Crown, as we shall see. 
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland were still proprietary colonies, but through 
self-interest the nominal proprietors granted a large measure of self-government. 

133 



i 3 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The other colonies had elective legislatures, but in each the Royal Governor 
had an absolute veto power over legislation. In all the bond to the English 
Crown was the charter or royal grant. Naturally, the colonists construed these 
grants very strictly, confining the power of the Governor to the closest legal 
construction of the charter, and assuming for themselves every power not 
specifically withheld. Above all, the colonists well understood the immense 
advantage that their power to grant or withhold supplies of money gave them. 
In reality, government in local matters practically rested with the Assemblies. 
The Royal Governors might, and did, fume and fret, complain to the English 
Government, and denounce their subjects as turbulent and obstinate, but they 
were met by passive resistance and, in more than one case, by actual force. 

Looking more closely into the political structure of the colonies, we find 
in New England, in full swing, the purest democracy the world has ever known, 
in the town-meeting system. In these town meetings every citizen had his right 
to speak and his vote, and the meeting assumed the fullest authority over all 
local matters, forming, also, the unit for legislative representation. In the 
Southern colonies the county took the place of the New England town as the 
political unit, but here, also, the democratic idea had taken strong hold. 
Massachusetts and Virginia were by far the most advanced examples of these 
two types of local government. As might naturally be expected, therefore, we 
find them always in the lead in resenting arbitrary actions of the Royal 
Governors and of the Crown. They were not only the largest and oldest of 
the colonies, but their peoples were far the most homogeneous. In each the 
population was almost wholly English, and in large part was made up of the 
third and fourth generations of the original settlers. Differing as widely as 
possible in origin — the one people coming mainly from the Roundheads, the 
other largely from the Cavaliers ; differing widely, also, in social and religious 
matters and in habits — the one being austere and simple in life, the other 
almost aristocratic ; — yet each had unified, had become distinctly American, and 
was free from close dependence on the mother country. 

Massachusetts and Virginia had also in common the bitter recollection of 
actual conflict with the royal authority. In Virginia Bacon's Rebellion had left 
the seeds of discontent. It originated in the wish of the Virginia colonists to 
put down Indian disturbances without waiting for the tardy action of the 
Governor. Nathaniel Bacon boldly led his neighbors to an attack on these 
Indians without due authority from Governor Berkeley, * who had promised him 
a commission, but had failed in this and other promises of assistance to the 
distressed colonists. Berkeley forthwith proclaimed Bacon a rebel, and war 
on a small scale ensued and continued until the latter's sudden death. Massa- 



* See illustration on page 77. 



CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE. 135 

chusetts had a still more irritating memory in the Andros tyranny and the 
loss of her charter. When Charles the Second mounted the throne his re- 
sentment at the Puritan sympathies of New England led him to lend a willing 
ear to various complaints against the province ; his commissioners were re- 
fused recognition by the General Court of the colony, which " pleaded his 
Majesty's charter;" the controversy became so intense that it is recorded that 
in 1 67 1 the colony was "almost on the brink of renouncing its dependence 
on the Crown ;" finally in 1684 the charter was declared forfeited by the Eng- 
lish Court of Chancery, and Sir Edmund Andros was sent out as "President 
of New England," a new and quite unconstitutional office. Connecticut, as 
every school-boy knows, saved her charter by hiding it in the historic oak 
tree ; Massachusetts was less fortunate, and something very like anarchy 
followed until the news came of the beginning of the reign of William and 
Mary, when Sir Edmund was seized and thrown into prison, and an as- 
sembly of representatives at Boston provisionally resumed the old charter. 
In the end the colony was forced to accept a new charter by which a Royal 
Governor was granted a veto power. But Massachusetts never forgot her 
old and more perfect torm of liberty, and never was as well disposed as 
before to the Crown. 

The colonies of New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas 
were in population comparatively mixed, were less unified ; and in them, 
therefore, we find, when the Revolution begins, a strong Tory element, which 
made their action uncertain and often reluctant. Generally speaking, the 
Royal Governors of the colonies were not in sympathy with the peoples ; they 
were usually arrogant, sometimes mere adventurers, often weak and vacil- 
lating. Their quarrels with the Assemblies usually turned on grants of money. 

And here, even in early times, we find everywhere cropping up the principle 
which later was voiced in the watchword of the Revolution, "No taxation with- 
out representation." It has been said that this watchword was illogical ; that in 
point of fact not all people in England who were taxed were represented in 
Parliament, and that, on the other hand, the American colonies had no real wish 
for representation in Parliament. Both statements are true, but the representa- 
tion demanded by the Americans was that which they already had — that of 
their own legislatures. The idea was succinctly expressed as far back as 1728, 
when the Massachusetts General Court refused to grant a fixed salary for ( iov- 
ernor Burnet "because it is the undoubted right of all Englishmen, by Magna 
Charta, to raise and dispose of money for the public service, of their own free 
accord without compulsion." And the converse of it was seen in Pennsylvania 
when, the Governor having refused his assent to a bill containing a scheme of 
taxation, the Assembly demanded his assent as a right. The doctrine, in short, 
was simply that money raised from the people should be expended by the 



1 36 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

people, that the Assemblies were the legal representatives of the people, and that 
they, and they only, could know what taxes the people could bear and how the 
sums thus raised could be expended to public advantage. The expression of 
this theory varied continually up to the Declaration of Independence, but its 
substance was consistently maintained. From the position that parliament had 
no right to interfere in internal taxation the colonies in the end advanced to the 
position that their allegiance was to the Crown ; that the parliament was in no 
sense an Imperial Parliament ; that the Crown stood for English rule over all 
British dominions ; but that while the laws of England were to be enacted by 
the English parliament, the laws of the American colonies were to be formulated 
by their own representatives in legislatures assembled. It was only as a last 
resort and when driven to extremity that the colonies threw off that loyal alle- 
giance to the Crown which they had held to be quite consistent with the main- 
tenance of this basic principle of their liberties. 

Let us look now for a moment at the imperfect and temporary union 
entered into from time to time by the colonists for mutual defense, and which in 
a way foreshadowed the greater and permanent union of the future. Along the 
coast the English power had become continuous ; the Dutch power at New 
Amsterdam had been swept away ; the Spaniards had been pushed back to the 
South ; the Indians and the French were held at bay on the West and North. 
In King Philip's War the New England colonies had combined to raise two 
thousand troops and had conquered by concerted action. In the early French 
and Indian wars military operations had also been carried on in concert by the 
colonies with varying successes. Thus, the New England colonies and New 
York had captured Port Royal in 1690, and had even attempted an attack on 
Quebec, and in 1 709 and 1 7 1 2 expeditions were planned against Canada and 
Acadia, in which the colonies united. Both of these latter comparative failures 
led, by the way, to the issue of paper money to cancel the heavy debts incurred. 
When Great Britain was at war with Spain the Southern colonies — Georgia, 
Carolina and Virginia — had also united in an unsuccessful expedition led by 
Oglethorpe against Florida. In King George's War the colonies planned 
and carried out almost without help from England the expedition by which the 
French stronghold Louisburg was seized. Encouraged by this notable triumph 
of their four thousand troops, they projected the conquest of Canada — an under- 
taking so vast that it is not surprising that it was soon abandoned. 

But the most serious emergency arose when Prance and England were for 
a short time at peace, after the treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle (1748). The French 
plan of extension of territory in America was one of unbounded ambition and 
of unity of purpose. From New Orleans to Quebec the French had gradually 
erected a line of fortified posts along the course of the explorations of La Salle, 
foliet, Marquet and D'Iberville. Following their theory that the discoverers of 



^^ll|l!l|ll||llilll!l!iilll«|:iili-ii|p i l|,lllll , *|i|: l l!: J V ■ : 7 




138 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

a river were entitled to all the territory drained by it, they were occupying the 
Mississippi valley and were moving eastward toward the Alleghanies, thus draw- 
ing close round the English territory and threatening to invade it. Fortunately 
their line of outposts from Quebec to New Orleans was only as strong as its 
weakest part ; otherwise English supremacy on the Continent had been over- 
thrown. With their Indian allies the French were now face to face with the 
pioneers of the colonies who were pressing westward, and who on their side 
were strengthened by the Indian alliance of the Six Nations. The Ohio Com- 
pany had been formed for the purpose of colonizing the valley of the Ohio 
River and to check the progress of the French eastward. It was believed that 
the territory of the company was infringed upon by French settlements, and 
George Washington, then a young surveyor, was sent by Governor Dinwiddie, 
of Virginia, to examine the actual condition of affairs on the frontier. The wily 
French gave him fair words but no satisfaction. In this, Washington's first ser- 
vice to the country, he showed on a small scale the calmness, firmness and cour- 
age that made him a few years later the hope and support of a nation. His 
report on the frontier situation was so serious that the colonists determined on 
immediate war and Virginia called the other provinces to her aid. How to 
raise men and money was a serious question. It was to solve the difficulty of 
conducting the campaign that Benjamin Franklin proposed, at a meeting of 
commissioners of the several colonies held at Albany, a plan of confederation, 
commonly called the Albany Plan. It provided for a form of federal govern- 
ment which should not interfere with the internal affairs of any colony but should 
have supreme power in matters of mutual defense and in whatever concerned 
the colonies as a body. The Albany Plan included a President or Governor- 
General who should be appointed and paid by the King, and a Grand Council to 
be made up of delegates elected once in three years by the colonial legislatures. 
This scheme found favor neither with the Crown nor with the colonial assem- 
blies ; each party considered that too much power was given the other, and the 
colonies also objected to accepting taxes imposed upon them by a body in a 
sense foreign to each though composed of delegates from all. Yet the project 
is of immense interest and significance, historically, because it shows in what 
way men's minds were turning and how the leaven of National unity was work- 
ing almost without the knowledge of the people themselves. 

The war that ensued was at first carried on in America alone, though after 
two years it became a part of. the great Seven Years War between France and 
England (1755-63). At the outset the key of the territorial struggle lay at 
the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers, near where Pitts- 
burgh now stands. Here Washington was besieged in Fort Necessity and 
was compelled to capitulate by overwhelming forces, but under honorable con- 
ditions. The French still held Fort Du Ouesne, and against this Braddock's 



CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE. 



139 



unfortunate expedition was directed. Now at last the colonists were dispos- 
sessed of their old idea of the invincibility of British troops. The regulars, 
disregarding- the advice of the Americans, who understood Indian and French 
warfare, fell into an ambuscade and were all but cut to pieces. The lesson 
must have been a startling one to the untrained, half-armed provincial troops. 
As one writer has said, "The provincial who had stood his ground, firing from 
behind trees and stumps, while the regulars ran past him in headlong retreat, 
came home with a sense of his own innate superiority which was sure to bring 
its results." Thus and in many other ways throughout the war the Americans 
learned their own possibilities as soldiers on their own ground. The details 
of the war need not here be reviewed. With the great battle on the Plains 
of Abraham and the death of the heroic Wolfe and the not less intrepid Mont- 
calm, French dominion in the new world 
perished forever. It is well known that 
the mortification of the French statesmen 
was allayed by the astute reflection that 
the now undisputed power of Great Britain 
was likely to be but temporary. Said the 
Duke de Choiseul, " Well, so we are 
gone ; it will be England's turn next." 
He saw — and other French statesmen pre- 
dicted the same thing — that the very fact 
that no external enemies threatened the 
provinces would bring them face to face 
with the mother country for the final 
struggle. 

Indeed, the treaty of Paris was not 
even signed when the mutterings of the 

storm were heard. Now, thought England, was the time to enforce her dis- 
regarded authority ; now, thought the colonies, was the time to insist on 
their rights of expansion and of self-government. England's whole theory of 
the relation of colonies was radically wrong, though she held it in common with 
other great Powers. This theory was that the colony was merely a commercial 
dependency — a place where the mother country could extend its trade ; while by 
no means was the colony to be allowed to compete in trade at home or in the 
world's markets. To this end had been enacted years before the so-called Navi- 
gation Laws. By these Americans were forbidden to export their products to 
other countries than England, to buy the products of other countries except 
from English traders, to manufacture goods which could compete in the colonies 
with English importations (for instance, there was even a law against the 
making of hats), or to ship goods from colony to colony except in British 




MARTELLO TOWER ON THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM, 
WHERE WOLFE WAS KILLED. 



i 4 o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

vessels ; while a high protective tariff prevented the colonists from selling 
grain and other raw products to England. A peculiarly ingenious and an- 
noying repressive measure was that known as the Molasses Act, aimed to stop 
that extensive trade which consisted in taking dried fish to the French West 
Indies, receiving molasses in return, bringing it to New England, there turn- 
ing it into rum, and finally, taking the rum to Africa, where it was often traded 
for slaves, who in turn were usually sold again in the West Indies. The Mo- 
lasses Act insisted that the Yankee traders should carry their fish only to the 
British West Indies ; and as these islands did not wish the fish there was an 
end, theoretically, to a very profitable if not altogether moral system. 

In point of fact, all these laws had been constantly disregarded ; smuggling 
and surreptitious trading were universal. But now it was suddenly attempted 
to enforce them, and that by the obnoxious Writs of Assistance — search warrants 
made out in blank, so that they could be filled out and used by any officer, 
against any person, at any time. This was quite contrary to the spirit of the 
English law, and met with such a sturdy resistance that, though the courts did 
not dare to declare the writs illegal, the practice was abandoned. James Otis, 
in particular, thundered against the Writs of Assistance (rather than to defend 
which he had thrown up his office as King's Prosecutor) in a speech at the 
utterance of which John Adams declared "the child, Independence, was born." 
Almost simultaneously with this excitement in Boston, Patrick Henry was 
delivering his maiden speech in Virginia against the royal veto of a bill dimin- 
ishing the salaries of the clergy. He denounced any interference with Virginia's 
law-making power, and boldly proclaimed that when a monarch so acted he 
"from being the father of his people degenerated into a tyrant, and forfeits all 
rights to obedience." 

While yet the bickering about the old laws continued, a quite novel 
form of taxation was rushed through Parliament, "with less opposition than a 
turnpike bill." The Stamp Act was indeed a firebrand such as its originators 
little suspected. Great Britain had been at great expense during the recent 
wars, and naturally thought that the Colonies should bear their share of the 
cost. On their side, the Colonies maintained that they had done all that with 
their feeble means was possible. George III had lately (1760) mounted the 
throne. He was narrow-minded, obstinate, a thorough believer in kingly 
authority ; and, as he could not strive for personal supremacy by the means which 
proved so fatal to Charles I, he adopted the methods of wholesale political 
bribery, of continual intrigue, and of relentless partisan enmity to those who 
opposed him. It was because these opponents of his, or some of them, sympa- 
thized with America that he grew fixed in his determination to exact obedience. 
He hated the liberty-loving Colonists chiefly because he hated the New Whigs 
in England. His minister, Grenville, thought to please his royal master, and at 



142 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the same time not to offend beyond endurance the Americans, by his invention 
of the Stamp Act. This ordered that in the Colonies all contracts, legal papers, 
wills, real-estate transfers, as well as newspapers, should be printed on stamped 
paper, or on paper to which stamps had been affixed. Coincident with it was 
passed a law ordering the colonial assemblies to support in various ways the 
royal troops which should be sent to them. So that this whole scheme proposed, 
first, to tax the Colonies illegally (as they held), then to send soldiers among 




OLD BUILDING AT BOSTON WHERE THE TEA-PLOT IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN HATCHED. 



them to enforce the tax, and, finally, to compel them to pay for the support of 
these very soldiers. No wonder that a storm of indignation raged from Maine 
to Georgia. Grenville himself was amazed at the result. In Massachusetts 
Samuel Adams declared that this was violating the liberty of self-government, 
to which subjects in America were entitled to the same extent as subjects in 
Britain. Patrick Henry, in Virginia, presented resolutions declaring that, "The 
taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to 



CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE. 143 

represent them, who can only know what taxes the people are able to bear, is 
the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom," and that the General 
Assembly of Virginia, therefore, had the sole and exclusive right and power to 
lay taxes upon the inhabitants of the Colony. A congress of delegates from 
nine of the Colonies soon met at New York and set forth the same principle 
of Colonial rights in a petition to the Crown. No attempt was made by this 
Stamp Act Congress to do more than declare the feelings of the united Colonies. 
But it was a distinct advance in the direction of union. Meanwhile, the people 
at large showed a disposition to take the matter in their own hands, without 
regard to Parliament or Congress, or lawyers, or finespun theories of constitu- 
tional right. When the stamps arrived they were burned or thrown into the 
sea ; stamp officers were compelled to resign their offices ; mobs in a few cases 
injured the property of obnoxious persons; the "Sons of Liberty" formed 
themselves into clubs and warned all to " touch not the unclean thing " under 
penalty of mob law. When the time came for the Stamp Act to go into 
operation there were no stamp officers to enforce it. One of them has left it 
on record that when he rode into Hartford to deposit his resignation, with a 
thousand armed farmers at his heels, he felt "like Death on the pale horse with 
all hell following him." No doubt there were some acts of mob law at this 
time which a strict sense of justice could not approve, but, as Macaulay has 
said, "the cure for the evils of liberty is more liberty;" and so, in the end, it 
proved in this case. 

On May 1 6th, 1766, a Boston paper published what we should call to-day 
an "extra," in which, under the heading "Glorious News," it reported the arrival 
of a vessel belonging to John Hancock, with news of the repeal of the Stamp 
Act. Grenville's Ministry had fallen, and with it fell his measure. Rejoicings 
in London were, the paper stated, general. Ships in the river had displayed 
all their colors, and illuminations and bonfires were going on all over the city. 
This shows how widespread at that time was the English sympathy for Ameri- 
cans ; even during the war it was not wholly suppressed. The " extra " from 
which we have quoted ends its account by saying, "It is impossible to express 
the joy the town is now in, on receiving the above great, glorious, and import- 
ant news. The bells in all the churches were immediately set a ringing, and we 
hear the day for a general rejoicing will be the beginning of next week." 

But even this change of front on the part of Parliament was accompanied 
by a gratuitous declaration to the effect that it had the power " to bind the 
colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever." 

Lord Rockingham's Ministry, which had repealed the futile and fruitless 
Stamp Act, lasted but a year ; it was followed by that of which the Duke of 
Grafton was nominally the head, but in which the unscrupulous and audacious 
Lord Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was the real leader. He 



144 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

at once proposed and carried a law imposing on die American Colonies import 
taxes on glass, paper, painters' colors, lead and tea. To such laws as this, he 
cunningly argued, the Colonies had often before submitted. In a way they sub- 
mitted to this also ; that is to say, they did not at first resist its constitutionality, 
but retorted by entering into "non-importation" agreements, by which they 
bound themselves as individuals not to purchase the taxed articles. Merchants 
who persisted in selling the obnoxious goods were boycotted, as we call it now, 
and found placards posted up in which it was demanded that — to quote one 
of these notices literally — " the Sons and Daughters of Liberty would not buy 
any one thing of him, for in so doing they will bring Disgrace upon themselves 
and their Posterity, for crrr and ever, Amen." It was not denied that it was the 
intention to use the sums raised by these taxes to pay the salaries of the royal 
governors and of the colonial judges, and to maintain British troops in the 
colonies. This was emphatically subversive of free government. New York 
refused to make provision for troops quartered upon it, and only consented 
tardily and imperfectly when its legislature was, as a penalty, suspended by the 
Crown. Massachusetts threw all kinds of technical legal obstructions in the 
way of providing for the two British regiments which arrived at Boston. Pro- 
tests against the Townshend Act made in an orderly meeting in Boston were 
denounced in Great Britain as treasonable, and it was proposed that colonists 
guilty of such offenses should be brought to England and there tried for trea- 
son. If anything were needed to inflame still further the colonists' indignation 
it was this. Massachusetts sent out a circular letter to other colonies asking 
them to unite in petitions and remonstrances to the king ; this in turn was 
treated as also treasonable ; a disturbance caused by the seizure of a sloop be- 
longing to John Hancock for customs' offenses was magnified into a riot ; the 
dreaded act providing for the trial of accused colonists in England was passed ; 
in every way the situation was becoming critical. 

The presence of the British troops in Boston was irritating in the extreme 
to the masses of the citizens ; quarreling between soldiers and citizens of the 
rougher class was constantly going on, and finally in March, 1770, a street 
brawl ended in the so-called Boston Massacre, when the troops, not without very 
great provocation, fired upon the citizens, killing five and wounding six. From 
that day the hearts of the common people were ready for armed resistance at 
any minute. Looking back on the " massacre " from the cool standpoint of 
history, it must be admitted that it was not quite the merciless and causeless 
act of brutality which it seemed then to the inflamed minds of the populace, but 
its influence at the time was enormous. 

The year of the Boston Massacre saw also the accession of the subservient 
Lord North as the Prime Minister and tool of George III. With him began a 
new chapter in the attempt to enforce taxation without representation. The 



CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE. 145 

non-importation pledges were beginning to fall into disuse, and Lord North was 
led to hope that by removing all the taxes except that on tea the colonists 
would yield the point of principle involved. George III himself had said, "I 
am clear there must always be one tax to keep up the right," and it was thought 
that the threepence per pound would be regarded as a trifle not worth fighting 
for. But the colonists were not fighting for money but for a principle ; and in 
1772 it was found that the tea tax was yielding only $400 a year, while it was 
costing over a million of dollars to collect it. A last cunning trick was attempted 
by Lord North ; he gave the East India Company a rebate on teas taken 
to America, thus making it possible for the colonists to buy the tea with 
the threepenny tax still on it and yet pay less than before the tax was laid. It 
is to the honor of our forefathers that the subterfuge was instantly detected and 
the new proposal resented as the deepest insult. Cargoes of tea were sent 
to Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In the first city the tea 
was stored in damp cellars and purposely spoiled ; New York and Philadelphia 
refused to allow the tea to be landed ; Boston held her famous tea party ; and 
in still other ports the tea was burned. 

The destruction of the tea in Boston harbor was not one of those mob acts 
(like the brawl which led to the Boston Massacre, or the burning of the 
revenue schooner " Gaspe " in Rhode Island) which are the inevitable but 
regretable accompaniments of a great popular movement ; it was rather a 
deliberate act, agreed on by the wisest leaders and carried out or sanctioned 
by the people at large. Thousands of sober citizens stood upon the shore and 
watched the party, disguised as Indians, who hurled the hated tea overboard ; 
so eminent a man as Samuel Adams led the party, and to this day no 
American has felt otherwise than proud of the significant and patriotic deed. 

Events now hurried rapidly one upon another. The British Parliament's 
reply to the Boston Tea Party was the Boston Port Bill, which absolutely forbade 
any trade in or out of the port. Simultaneously the charter of Massachusetts 
was changed so as to give the Crown almost unlimited power and to abolish town 
meetings, while it was made legal to quarter troops in Boston itself, and 
General Gage, the commander-in-chief of the British troops in the colonies, was 
made Governor of Massachusetts. This attack upon one of the colonies was 
regarded as a challenge to all. The system of correspondence committees, 
started locally in Massachusetts and extended, at Virginia's suggestion, between 
the colonies, for counsel and mutual support, was made the means of calling 
together at Philadelphia the first Continental Congress (September 5th, 1774). 
In this all the colonies but Georgia were represented, and among the delegates 
were George Washington and Patrick Henry, of Virginia ; John and Samuel 
Adams, of Massachusetts; fohn [ay, of New York, and many others famous in 
our historical annals. This first reallv National Congress was moderate but firm 



146 



THIi STORY OF AMERICA. 



in its action. It drew up a declaration of rights, which was a splendid recital of the 
wrongs complained of, prepared an address to the King, and adopted what was 
called the American Association, an agreement to prevent all importation from 
and exportation to Great Britain 
until justice was done ; it ad- 
journed with the expressed re- 
solve to meet again, if necessary, 
the following year. 

England now considered the 
colonies as in open rebellion, and 
indeed they were, at least in 
arms ; Massachusetts alone had 




J'(r, 



■ : 
1 



PURSUIT OF PAUL REVERE, THE SCOUT. 



twenty thousand "minute men" ready to respond to the first call. And 
that call soon came. General Gage sent troops to the number of eight 
hundred to Concord, to destroy military stores there accumulated and to 
arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, to be sent for trial as traitors to 



CUTTING LOOSE FROM EUROPE. 147 

England. The events of that expedition are familiar to us all. Boston was 
at that time a city of 17,000 inhabitants, guarded by 3000 British regulars. 
The inhabitants had patiently waited for the troops to strike the first blow, 
until the latter attributed their inaction to cowardice. But this expedition 
to arrest the American leaders would bring -matters to the long-waited-for 
crisis. On that night (April iS) Paul Revere, in company with Davies and 
Prescott, started with a message from Dr. Joseph Warren, Vme of the leading 
spirits in Boston. The message was Hashed by a lantern across the Charles 
river ; it was to tell the farmers and townsfolk that the hour for resistance was 
come. A handful of colonists collected on the Lexington Green were fired 
upon by the British, and eight or ten were killed ; the troops pressed on to 
Concord and seized the stores ; but their retreat to Lexington was one long 
fight with the " embattled farmers " posted behind stonewalls and trees and 
hidden in houses. When, reaching Lexington, the British were reinforced from 
Boston, they were so exhausted that a British writer says they laid down on the 
ground in the hollow square made by the fresh troops, " with their tongues hang- 
ing out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase." The British had lost 
two hundred and seventy-three men ; the Americans one hundred and three. 
Paul Revere's midnight ride had fulfilled its mission. The " shot heard round 
the world " had been fired. 

The war for independence had begun. 




MEETING OF WASHINGTON AND KOCHAMBEAU. 
I4S 




CHAPTER VIII. 

THE WA.R. FOR INDEPENDENCE. 

WITTY foreigner, watching the course of the American Revo- 
lution, wrote to Benjamin Franklin that Great Britain was 
undertaking the task "of catching two millions of people in a 
boundless desert with fifty thousand men." This was a crude 
and inaccurate way of putting it, but it expresses succinctly the 
magnitude and difficulty of the campaign that lay before the 
British generals. They had to contend with an illusive enemy 
in his own country, constantly strengthened by uprisings of 
the people in each vicinity where the war was at the minute going on ; they 
were unable to move far from their bases of supplies, which were necessarily 
the great seaport towns they might capture ; they were hampered by lack of 
real heartiness in the English people for the struggle ; and they were self- 
deceived as to the assistance they might hope for from Tory sympathizers in 
this country. When Parliament rather reluctantly authorized the raising of 
twenty-five thousand men for the war, Great Britain was still forced to obtain 
most of this number by subsidizing German mercenaries from the small princi- 
palities, who were indiscriminately called Hessians by the colonists, and the 
employment of whom did much to still further provoke bitterness of feeling. 
At one time in the Revolution Great Britain had over three hundred thousand 
men in arms, the world over, but of this number not more than one-tenth could 
be sent to America. But the greatest obstacle to British success lay in the fact 
that the English leaders, military and civil, constantly underrated the courage, 
endurance, and earnestness of their opponents. That raw militia could stand 
their ground against regulars was a hard lesson for the British to learn ; that 
men from civil life could show such aptitude for strategy as did Washington, 
Schuyler, and Greene, was a revelation to the professional military men the 
significance of which they grasped only when it was too late. 

Above all. the one thing that made the colonists the victors was the indom- 
itable energy, self-renunciation, and strategic ability <»i George Washington. 
We are so accustomed to think of Washington's moral qualities, that it is only 

149 



150 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



when we come close to the history of the war that we fully recognize how great 
was his military genius — a genius which justly entitles him to rank with the few 

truly great soldiers of his- 
tory, such as Alexander, 
Caesar, Napoleon, and Yon 
Moltke. A 1 m o s t alone 
among the American gen- 
erals of the Revolution, he 
was always willing to subor- 
dinate his own personal 
glory to the final success 
of his deep laid and com- 
prehensive plans. Again 
and again he risked his 
standing with Congress, 
and ran the danger of 
being superseded by one 
or another jealous general 
of lower rank, rather than 
yield in a particle his de- 
liberate scheme of cam- 
paign. Others received 
the popular honors for bril- 
liant single movements 
while he waited and plan- 
ned for the final result. 
What the main lines of his 
strategy were we shall en- 
deavor to make clear in 
the following sketch : — 

When the news of the 
running tight from Con- 
cord to Lexington spread 
through the country, the 
militia hurried from every 
direction toward Boston. 
Israel Putnam literally left 
his plough in the field ; 
John Stark, with his sturdy 
New Hampshire volunteers, reached the spot in three days ; Nathaniel Greene 
headed fifteen hundred men from Rhode Island ; Benedict Arnold led a band 





WASHINGTON'S RECEPTION AT TRENTON. 
■5 1 



1 52 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of patriots from Connecticut ; the more distant colonies showed equal eager- 
ness to aid in the defense of American liberties. Congress displayed deep 
wisdom in appointing George Washington Commander in Chief, not only 
because of his personal ability and the trust all men had in him, but because 
it was politically an astute measure to choose the leader from some other 
State than Massachusetts. But before Washington could reach the Con- 
tinental forces, as they soon began to be called, the battle of Bunker Hill 
had been fought. And before that, even, Ethan Allen, with his Green Moun- 
tain Boys, had seized Fort Ticonderoga "in the name of Jehovah and the Con- 
tinental Congress " — which Congress, by the way, showed momentarily some 
reluctance to sanction this first step of aggressive warfare. The occupation by 
Allen and Arnold of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, at the southern end of 
Lake Champlain, was of great military importance, both because of the large 
quantities of ammunition stored there, and because these places defended the 
line of the Hudson River valley against an attack from Canada. 

The battle of Bunker Hill, looked at from the strictly military point of 
view, was a blunder on both sides, astonishing as was its moral effect. The 
hill, properly named Breed's Hill, but to which the name of Bunker Hill is 
now forever attached, rises directly back of Charlestown, on a peninsula con- 
nected with the main land by a narrow isthmus. The American forces seized 
this on the night of fune 16th, 1775, and worked the night through intrenching 
themselves as well as they could. With the morning came the British attack. 
The position might easily have been reduced by seizing the isthmus, and for this 
reason the Americans had hardly shown military sagacity in their occupation of 
the hill. But the British chose rather to storm the works from the front. 
Three times the flower of the English army in battle line swept up the hill ; 
twice they were swept back with terrible loss, repulsed by a fire which was 
reserved until they were close at hand ; the third time they seized the position, 
but only when the Americans had exhausted their ammunition, and even then 
only after a severe hand to hand fight. The British loss was over a thousand 
men ; the American loss about four hundred and fifty. When Washington 
heard of the battle he instantly asked if the New England militia had stood 
the fire of the British regulars, and when the whole story was told him he 
exclaimed, "The liberties of the country are safe." The spirit shown then and 
thereafter by our sturdy patriots is well illustrated by the story (chosen as the 
subject of one of our pictures) of the minister, who when in one battle there 
was a lack of wadding for the guns, brought out an armful of hymn books and 
exclaimed " Give them Watts, boys ! " 

The next clash of arms came from Canada. General Montgomery led two 
thousand of the militia against Montreal, by way of Lake Champlain, and easily 
captured it (November 12, 1775). Thence he descended the St. Lawrence to 



THE SIEGE OF BOSTON. 



153 



Quebec, where he joined forces with Benedict Arnold, who had brought twelve 
hundred men through the Maine wilderness, and the two Generals attacked 
the British stronghold of Quebec. The attempt was a failure ; Arnold was 
wounded, Montgomery was killed, and 
though the Americans fought gallantly ~— - 
they were driven back from Canada by 




VE THEM WATTS, Bl IYS ! 

superior forces. Meanwhile 
the siege of Boston was syste- 
matically carried on by Wash- 
ington, and in the spring of 
1776 the American General gained a 
commanding position by seizing Dor- 
chester Heights (which bore much the 
same relation to Boston on the South that Breed's Hill did on the North) and 
General Howe found himself forced to evacuate the city. He sailed with his 
whole force for Halifax, taking with him great numbers of American sym- 
pathizers with British rule, together with their property. 



154 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The new Congress met at Philadelphia in May. During the first month of 
its sessions it became evident that there had been an immense advance in pub- 
lic opinion as to the real issue to be maintained. Several of the colonies had 
expressed a positive conviction that National independence must be demanded. 
Virginia had formally instructed her delegates to take that ground, and it was 
on the motion of Richard Henry Lee, of \ irginia, seconded by John Adams, of 
Massachusetts, that Congress proceeded to consider the resolution "That these 
united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent States ; that 
they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political 
connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be 
totally dissolved." This bold utterance was adopted on July 2d by all the colo- 
nies except New York. The opposition came mainly from Pennsylvania and 
New York, and was based, not on lack of patriotism, but on a feeling that the 
time for such an assertion had not yet come, that a stronger central government 
should first be established, and that attempts should be made to secure a for- 
eign alliance. It should be noticed that the strongest opponents of the measure, 
John Dickinson and Robert Morris, of Pennsylvania, were among the most 
patriotic supporters of the Union. To Robert Morris in particular, whose skill 
as a financier steered the young Nation through many a difficulty, the country 
owes a special debt of gratitude. The Declaration of Independence, formally 
adopted two clays later, was written mainly by the pen of Thomas Jefferson. 
It is unique among State papers — a dignified though impassioned, a calm 
though eloquent, recital of injuries inflicted, demand for redress, and avowal of 
liberties to be maintained with the sword. Its adoption was hailed, the country 
through, as the birth of a new Nation. Never before has a country about to 
appeal to war to decide its fate put upon record so clear-toned and deliberate 
an assertion of its purposes and its reasons, and thus summoned the world and 
posterity to witness the justice and righteousness of its cause. 

Thus far in the war the engagements between the opposing forces had 
been of a detached kind — not related, that is, to any broad plan of attack or 
defense. Of the same nature also was the British expedition against South 
Carolina, led by Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis. Their fleet attacked 
Charleston, but the fort was so bravely defended by Colonel Moultrie, from his 
palmetto-log fortifications on Sullivan's Island, that the fleet was forced to aban- 
don the attempt and to return to New York. But the British now saw that it 
was imperative to enter upon a distinct and extensive plan of campaign. That 
adopted was sagacious and logical ; its failure was due, not to any inherent 
defect in itself, but to lack of persistency in adhering to it. Washington under- 
stood it thoroughly from the first, and bent all his energies to tempting the 
enemy to diverge from the main object in view. The plan, in brief, was this : 
New York City was to be seized and held as a base of supplies and centre of 



THE BRITISH PLAN FEASIBLE. 155 

operations ; from it a stretch of country to the west was to be occupied and 
held, thus cutting oft communication between New York and the Xew England 
States on the one side and Pennsylvania and the Southern States on the other. 
Meanwhile a force was to be pushed down from Canada to the head of the 
Hudson River, to be met by another force pushed northward up the Hudson. 
In this way New England would be practically surrounded, and it was thought 
that its colonies could be reduced one by one, while simultaneously or later an 
army could march southward upon Philadelphia. The plan was quite feasible, 
but probably at no time did the British have sufficient force to carry it out in 
detail. They wofully over-estimated, also, the assistance they might receive 
from the Tories in New York State. And they still more wofully under-esti- 
mated Washington's ability as a strategist in blocking their schemes. 

General Howe, who was now Commander-in-Chief of the British army, 
drew his forces to a head upon Staten Island, combining there the troops which 
had sailed from Boston to Halifax, with Clinton's forces which had failed at 
Charleston, and the Hessians newly arrived. In all he had over thirty thousand 
soldiers. Washington, who had transferred his headquarters from Boston to 
the vicinity of New York after the former city had been evacuated by the 
British, occupied the Brooklyn Heights with about twenty thousand poorly 
equipped and undrilled colonial troops. To hold that position against the 
larger forces of regulars seemed a hopeless task ; but every point was to be 
contested. In point of fact, only five thousand of the Americans were engaged 
in the battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776) against twenty thousand men 
brought by General Howe from Staten Island. The Americans were driven 
back after a hotly contested fight. Before Howe could follow up his victory 
Washington planned and executed one of those extraordinary, rapid movements 
which so often amazed his enemy ; in a single night he withdrew his entire army 
across the East River into New York in boats, moving so secretly and swiftly 
that the British first found out what had happened when they saw the deserted 
camps before them on the following morning. Drawing back through the city 
Washington made his next stand at Harlem Heights, occupying Fort Washing- 
ton on the east and Fort Lee on the west side of the Hudson, thus guarding 
the line of the river while prepared to move southward toward Philadelphia if 
occasion should require. In the battle of White Plains the Americans suffered 
a repulse, but much more dispiriting to Washington was the disarrangement 
of his plans caused by the interference of Congress. That over-prudent body 
sent special orders to General Greene, at Fort Washington, to hold it at all 
odds, while Washington had directed Greene to be ready on the first attack to 
fall back upon the main army in New Jersey. The result was the capture of 
Fort Washington, with a loss of three thousand prisoners. To add to the 
misfortune, General Charles Lee, who commanded a wincr of the American 



'''I'" 1 '. •Wmi$a : i\ \ /(Sfi ■■ i; ' ■ : ■Wifi|||;ji..: , ' : ■■ ; '!i,i: i ;.;.;^-, : ■ f 




RECKONED WITHOUT HIS HOST. 157 

army on the east side of the river, absolutely ignored Washington's orders to 
join him. Lee was a soldier of fortune, vain, ambitious, and volatile, and there 
is little doubt that his disobedience was due to his hope that Washington was 
irretrievably ruined and that he might succeed to the command. Gathering his 
scattered troops together as well as he could, Washington retreated through 
New Jersey, meeting everywhere with reports that the colonists were in despair, 
that many had given in their allegiance to the British, that Congress had fled to 
Baltimore, and that the war was looked on as almost over. In this crisis it was 
an actual piece of rare good fortune that Charles Lee should be captured by 
soldiers while spending the night at a tavern away from his camp, for the result 
was that Lee's forces were free to join Washington's command, and at once 
did so. Altogether some six thousand men were left in the army, and 
were drawn into something like coherence on the other side of the Delaware 
River. General Howe announced that he had now nothing to do but wait the 
freezing of the Delaware, and then to cross over and "catch Washington and 
end the war." 

But he reckoned without his host. Choosing, as the best time for his bold 
and sudden movement, Christmas night, when revelry in the camp of the 
enemy might be hoped to make them careless, Washington crossed the river. 
Leading in person the division of twenty-five hundred men, which alone suc- 
ceeded in making the passage over the river, impeded as it was with great 
blocks of ice, he marched straight upon the Hessian outposts at Trenton and 
captured them with ease. Still his position was a most precarious one. Corn- 
wallis was at Princeton with the main British army, and marching directly upon 
the Americans, penned them up, as he thought, between Trenton and the 
Delaware. It is related that Cornwallis remarked, "At last we have run down 
the old fox, and we will bag him in the morning." But before morning came 
Washington had executed another surprising and decisive manoeuvre. Main- 
taining a great show of activity at his intrenchments, and keeping camp-fires 
brightly burning, he noiselessly led the main body of his army round the flank 
of the British force and marched straight northward upon Princeton, capturing 
as he went the British rear guard on its way to Trenton, seizing the British 
post of supplies at New Brunswick, and in the end securing a strong position 
on the hills in Northern New Jersey, with Morristown as his headquarters. 
There he could at last rest for a time, strengthen his army, and take advantage 
of the prestige which his recent operations had brought him. 

Let us turn our attention now to the situation further north. General 
Burgoyne had advanced southward from Canada through Lake Champlain and 
had easily captured Ticonderoga. His object was, of course, to advance in the 
same line to the south until he reached the Hudson River ; but this was a very 
different matter from what he had supposed it. General Schuyler was in com- 



158 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



mand of the Americans, and showed the highest military sk 
goyne's progress, cutting off his sup- 
plies and harassing him generally. An 
expedition to assist Burgoyne had been 
sent down the St. Lawrence to Lake 
Ontario, thence to march eastward to ' 
the head of the Hudson, gathering aid -^^ v 

as it went from the Indians and Tories. • iSfe 



11 in 



opposing Bur- 




This expedi- 
tion was an 
utter failure ; 
a t Oriskany 
the Tories and 
British were defeated in a fiercely fought battle, in which a greater proportion 



SURRENDER OF BURi 



SURRENDER OF GENERAL BURGOYNE. 159 

of those engaged were killed than in any other battle of the war. Disheart- 
ened at this, and at the near approach of Benedict Arnold, St. Leger, who 
was at the head of the expedition, lied in confusion back to Canada. 
Meanwhile Burgoyne had sent out a detachment to gather supplies. This 
was utterly routed at Bennington by the Vermont farmers under General 
Stark. Through all the country round about the Americans were Hocking to 
arms, their patriotism enforced by their horror at the atrocities committed by 
Burgoyne's Indian allies and by the danger to their own homes. Practically, 
Burgoyne was surrounded, and though he fought bravely in the battles of Still- 
water (September 19, 1777) and Bemis's Heights (October 7th), he was over- 
matched. Ten days after the last-named battle he surrendered with all his 
forces to General Gates, who was now at the head of the American forces in 
that vicinity and thus received the nominal honor of the result, although it was 
really due rather to the skill and courage of General Schuyler and General 
Arnold. Almost six thousand soldiers laid down their arms, and the artillery, 
small arms, ammunition, clothing, and other military stores which fell into Gen- 
eral Gates's hands were immensely valuable. Almost greater than the prac- 
tical gain of this splendid triumph was that of the respect at once accorded 
throughout the world to American courage and military capacity. 

General Burgoyne had every right to lay the blame for the mortifying 
failure of his expedition upon Howe, who had totally failed to carry out his 
part of the plan of campaign. It was essential to the success of this plan that 
Howe should have pushed an army up the Hudson to support Burgoyne. In 
leaving this undone he committed the greatest blunder of the war. Why he 
acted as he did was for a long while a mystery, but letters brought to light 
eighty years after the war was over show that he was strongly influenced by 
the traitorous arguments of his prisoner, Charles Lee, who for a time, at least, 
had decided to desert the American cause. While in this frame of mind he 
convinced Howe that there was plenty of time to move upon and seize 
Philadelphia and still come to Burgoyne's aid in season. Howe should have 
known Washington's methods better by this time. At first the British General 
attempted a march through New Jersey, but for nearly three weeks Washington 
blocked his movements, out-manceuvred him in the fencing for advantage of 
position, and finally compelled him to withdraw, baffled, to New York. Though 
no fighting of consequence occurred in this period, it is, from the military 
standpoint, one of the most interesting of the entire war. The result was that 
Howe, unwilling to give up his original design, transported his army to the 
mouth of the Delaware by sea, then decided to make his attempt by way of 
Chesapeake Bay, and finally, after great delay, landed his forces at the hea< I 1 if 
that bay, fifty miles from Philadelphia. Washington interposed his army 
between the enemy and the city and for several weeks delayed its inevitable 



160 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

capture. In the Battle ot Brandywine the Americans put eleven thousand 
troops in the field against eighteen thousand of the British, and were defeated, 
though by no means routed (September n, 1777). After Howe had seized 
the city he found it necessary to send part of his army to capture the forts on 
the Delaware River, and this gave the Americans the opportunity of an attack 
with evenly balanced forces. Unfortunately, the battle of Germantown was, by 
reason of a heavy fog, changed into a confused conflict, in which some American 
regiments fired into others, and which ended in the retreat of our forces. 
Washington drew back and went into winter quarters at Valley Forge. Con- 
gress, on the approach of the enemy, had fled to York. Howe had accomplished 
his immediate object, but at what a cost ! The possession of Philadelphia had 
not appreciably brought nearer the subjugation of the former colonies, while 
the opportunity to co-operate with Burgoyne had been irretrievably lost, and, 
as we have seen, a. great and notable triumph had been gained by the Americans 
in his surrender. 

The memorable winter which Washington spent at Valley Forge he often 
described as the darkest of his life. The course of the war had not been 
altogether discouraging, but he had to contend with the inaction of Congress, 
with cabals of envious rivals, and with the wretched lack of supplies and food. 
He writes to Congress that when he wished to draw up his troops to fight, the 
men were unable to stir on account of hunger, that 2898 men were unfit for 
duty because they were barefooted and half naked, that " for seven days past 
there has been little else than a famine in the camp." Meanwhile an intrigue 
to supersede Washington by Gates was on foot and nearly succeeded. The 
whole country also was suffering from the depreciated Continental currency 
and from the lack of power in the general government to lay taxes. What a 
contrast is there between Washington's position at this time and the enthusiasm 
with which the whole country flocked to honor him in the autumn of the first 
year of his Presidency (1789), when he made a journey which was one long 
series of ovations. An idea of the character of these is given in the accom- 
panying picture of his reception at Trenton, where the date on the triumphal 
arch recalled that famous Christmas night when he outwitted the British. 

But encouragement from abroad was at hand. Perhaps the most im- 
portant result of Burgoyne's surrender was its influence in procuring us the 
French Alliance. Already a strong sympathy had been aroused for the Amer- 
ican cause in France. The nobility were influenced in no small degree by the 
sentimental and philosophical agitation for ideal liberty which preceded the 
brutal reality of the French Revolution. Lafayette, then a mere boy of 
eighteen, had fitted out a ship with supplies at his own expense, and had 
laid his services at Washington's command. Our Commissioners to France 
— John Adams, Arthur Lee, and Benjamin Franklin — had labored night and 



CLINTON ABANDONS PHILADELPHIA. 16 1 

day for the alliance. Franklin, in particular, had, by his shrewd and homely 
wit, his honesty of purpose and his high patriotism, made a profound im- 
pression upon the French people. We read that on one occasion he was 
made to embrace the role of an Apostle of Liberty at an elegant fete where 
" the most beautiful of three hundred women was designated to go and place 
on the philosopher's white locks a crown of laurel, and to give the old man two 
kisses on his cheeks." Very "French" this, but not without its significance. 
But after all, the thing which turned the scale with the French Govern- 
ment was the partial success of our armies. France was only too willing, 
under favoring circumstances, to obtain its revenge upon Great Britain for 
many recent defeats and slights. So it was that in the beginning of 1 77S the 
independence of the United States was recognized by France and a fleet was 
sent to our assistance. During the winter, meanwhile, the thirteen States had 
adopted in Congress articles of confederation and perpetual union, which were 
slowly and hesitatingly ratified by the legislatures of the several States. 

The news of the reinforcements on their way from France, led Sir Henry 
Clinton, who had now succeeded Howe in the chief command of the British, to 
abandon Philadelphia, and mass his forces at New York. This he did in June, 
1778, sending part of the troops by sea and the rest northward, through New 
Jersey. Washington instantly broke camp, followed the enemy, and overtook 
him at Monmouth Court House. In the battle which followed the forces were 
equally balanced, each having about fifteen thousand men. The American 
attack was entrusted to Charles Lee, who had been exchanged, and whose 
treachery was not suspected. Again Lee disobeyed orders, and directed a 
retreat at the critical minute of the fight. Had Washington not arrived, the 
retreat would have been a rout ; as it was he turned it into a victory, driving 
the British from their position, and gained the honors of the day. But had it 
not been for Lee, this victory might have easily been made a crushing and final 
defeat for the British army. A court-martial held upon Lee's conduct expelled 
him from the army. Years later he died a disgraced man, though it is only in 
our time that the full extent of his dishonor has been understood. 

The scene of the most important military operations now changes from the 
Northern to the Southern States. But before speaking of the campaign which 
ended with Cornwallis's surrender, we may characterize the fighting in the 
North, which went on in the latter half of the war, as desultory and unsystem- 
atic in its nature. The French fleet under Count d'Estaing was unable to 
cross the New York bar on account of the depth of draught of its greatest 
ships ; and for that reason the attempt to capture New York City was aban- 
doned. Its next attempt was to wrest Rhode Island from the British. This 
also was defeated, partly because of a storm at a critical moment, partly 
through a misunderstanding with the American allies. After these two failures, 



l62 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the French Meet sailed to the West Indies to injure British interests there. The 
assault on the fort at Stony Point by "Mad Anthony" Wayne has importance 
as a brilliant and thrilling episode, and was of 
value in strengthening our position on the Hudson 
River. All along the border the Tories were 
inciting the Indians to barbarous attacks. The 
most important and 
deplorable of these at 




WASHINGTON REPROVING LEE AT 
MONMOUTH. 



*-i — ~-Sf 



tacks were those which ended 
in the massacres at Wyoming 
and Cherry Valley. Reprisals 
for these atrocities were taken 
by General Sullivan's expedi- 
tion, which defeated the Tories 
and Indians combined, near Elmira, with great slaughter. But all these events, 
like the British sudden attacks on the Connecticut ports of New Haven, 



BRITISH CONCESSION REPELLED. 



163 



Fairfield, and Norwalk, were, as we have said, rather detached episodes than 
related parts of a campaign. 

We should also note before entering upon the final chapter of the war, that 
Great Britain had politically receded from her position. Of her own accord 
she had offered to abrogate the offensive legislation which had provoked the 
colonies to war. But it was too late ; the proposition of peace commissioners 
sent to America to acknowledge the principle of taxation by colonial assemblies 




«§§§ Hfe 







NEGRO VILLAGE IN Gl.oKGl.i 



was not for a moment considered. The watchword of America was now 
Independence, and there was no disposition in any quarter to accept anything 
less than full recognition of the rights of the United States as a Nation. 

The second and last serious and concerted effort by the British to subjugate 
the American States had as its scene of operations our Southern territory. At 
first it seemed to succeed. A long series of reverses to the cause of independ- 
ence were reported from Georgia and South Carolina. The plan formed by 



1 64 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Sir Henry Clinton and Cornwallis was, in effect, to begin at the extreme South 
and overpower one State after another until the army held in reserve about 
New York could co-operate with that advancing victoriously from the South. 
Savannah had been captured in 1778, while General Lincoln, who commanded 
our forces, was twice defeated with great loss — once at Brier Creek, in an advance 
upon Savannah, when his lieutenant, General Ashe, was actually routed with very 
heavy loss ; and once when Savannah had been invested by General Lincoln 
himself by land, while the French fleet under d'Estaing besieged the city by sea. 
In a short time Georgia was entirely occupied by the British. They were soon 
reinforced by Sir Henry Clinton in person, with an army, and the united forces 
moved upward into South Carolina with thirteen thousand men. Lincoln was 
driven into Charleston, was there besieged, and (May 12, 1780) was forced to 
surrender not only the city but his entire army. A desultory but brilliant 
guerrilla warfare was carried on at this time by the Southern militia and light 
cavalry under the dashing leadership of Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox," 
and the partisan, Thomas Sumter. 

These men were privateers on horseback. Familiar with the tangled swamps 
and always well mounted, even though in rags themselves, they were the terror 
of the invaders. At the crack of their rifles the pickets of Cornwallis fled, 
leaving a score of dead behind. The dreaded cavalry of Tarleton often came 
back from their raids with many a saddle emptied by the invisible foes. They 
were here, they were everywhere. Their blows were switt and sure ; their 
vigilance sleepless. Tarleton had been sent by Cornwallis with a force of 
seven hundred cavalry to destroy a patriot force in North Carolina, under Bu- 
ford, which resulted in his utterly destroying about four hundred of the patriots 
at YVaxhaw, the affair being more of a massacre than a battle. Thus the name 
of Tarleton came to be hated in the South as thjJS of Benedict Arnold was in 
the North. He was dreaded for his celerity and cruelty. As illustrative of the 
spirit of the Southern colonists, we may be pardoned for the digression of the 
following anecdote. The fighting' of Marion and his men was much like that ot 
the wild Apaches of the southwest. When hotly pursued by the enemy his 
command would break up into small parties, and these as they were hard pressed 
would subdivide, until nearly every patriot was fleeing alone. There could be 
no successful pursuit, therefore, since the subdivision of the pursuing party 
weakened it too much. 

"We will give fifty pounds to get within reach of the scamp that galloped 
by here, just ahead of us," exclaimed a lieutenant of Tarleton's cavalry, as he 
and three other troopers drew up before a farmer, who was hoeing in the field 
by the roadside. 

The farmer looked up, leaned on his hoe, took off his old hat and mopping 
his forehead with his handkerchief looked at the angry soldier and said : — 



AN INTERESTING ANECDOTE. 



165 



" Fifty pounds is a big lot of money." 

"So it is in these times, but we'll give it to you in gold, if you'll sho\ 
us where we can get 
a chance at the rebel ; 
did you see him ? " 

"He was all 
alone, was 
he? And 





M' W: 



TARLETON' mm I! JAN1 AN!) THE FARMER (JACK DAVIS). 



he was mounted on a black horse with a white star in his forehead, and he 
was going like a streak of lightning, wasn't he?" 



1 66 THE STORY OF- AMERICA. 

" That's the fellow!" exclaimed the questioners, hoping they were about 
to get the knowledge they wanted. 

" It looked to me like Jack Davis, though he went by so fast that I couldn't 
get a square look at his face, but he was one of Marion's men, and if I ain't 
greatly mistaken it was Jack Davis himself." 

Then looking up at the four British horsemen, the farmer added, with a 
quizzical expression : — 

" I reckon that ere Jack Davis has hit you chaps pretty hard, ain't he? " 

"Never mind about tJiat" replied the lieutenant ; "what we want to know 
is where we can get a chance at him for just about five minutes." 

The farmer put his cotton handkerchief into his hat, which he now slowly 
replaced, and shook his head : " I don't think he's hiding round here," he said ; 
"when he shot by Jack was going so fast that it didn't look as if he could stop 
under four or five miles. Strangers, I'd like powerful well to earn that fifty 
pounds, but I don't think you'll get a chance to squander it on me." 

After some further questioning, the lieutenant and his men wheeled their 
horses and trotted back toward the main body of Tarleton's cavalry. The 
farmer plied his hoe for several minutes, gradually working his way toward the 
stretch of woods some fifty yards from the roadside. Reaching the margin of 
the field, he stepped in among the trees, hastily took off his clothing, tied it up 
in a bundle, shoved it under a flat rock from beneath which he drew a suit no 
better in quality, but showing a faint semblance to a uniform. Putting it on 
and then plunging still deeper into the woods, he soon reached a dimly-marked 
track, which he followed only a short distance, when a gentle whinney fell upon 
his ear. The next' moment he vaulted on the back of a bony but blooded horse, 
marked by a beautiful star in his forehead. The satin skin of the steed shone 
as though he had been traveling hard, and his rider allowed him to walk along 
the path for a couple of miles, when he entered an open space where, near a 
spring, Francis Marion and fully two hundred men were encamped. They were 
eating, smoking and chatting as though no such horror as war was known. 

You understand, of course, that the farmer that leaned on his hoe by the 
roadside and talked to Tarleton's lieutenant about Jack Davis and his exploits 
was Jack Davis himself. 

Marion and his men had many stirring adventures. A British officer, sent 
to settle some business with Marion, was asked by him to stay to dinner. 
Marion was always a charming gentleman, and the visitor accepted the 
invitation, but he was astonished to find that the meal consisted only of 
baked sweet potatoes served on bark. No apology was made, but the guest 
could not help asking his host whether that dinner was a specimen of his 
regular bill of fare. "It is," replied Marion, "except that to-day, in honor of 
your presence, we have more than the usual allowance." 



CAMPAIGN IN THE SOUTH. 



167 



North Carolina was now in danger, and it was to be defended by the 
overrated General Gates, whose 
campaign was marked by every in- 
dication of military incapacity. His 
attacks were invariably made reck 
lessly, and his positions were i 
chosen. At 
Camden he 




KM All' OK 1.1 Nl I iH 1 AKNnl I>, 



was utterly and disgracefully 
defeated by Lord Cornwallis 
(August 16, 1780). It seemed 
now as if the British forces could easily hold the territory already won and 
could advance safely into Virginia. This was, indeed, one of the darkest 
periods in the history of our war, and even Washington was inclined to despair. 



1 68 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

To add to the feeling of despondency came the news of Benedict Arnold's 
infamous treachery. In the early part of the war he had served, not merely 
with credit but with the highest distinction. Ambitious and passionate by temper, 
he had justly been indignant at the slights put upon him by the promotion over 
his head of several officers who were far less entitled than he to such a reward. 
He had also, perhaps, been treated with undue severity in his trial by court- 
martial on charges relating to his accounts and matters of discipline. No doubt 
he was greatly influenced by his marriage to a lady of great beauty, who was in 
intimate relations with many of the leading Tories. It is more than probable, 
still further, that he believed the cause of American independence could never 
be won. But neither explanations nor fancied wrongs in the least mitigate the 
baseness of his conduct. He deliberately planned to be put in command of 
West Point, with the distinct intention of handing it over to the British in return 
for thirty thousand dollars in money and a command in the British army. It 
was almost an accident that the emissary between Arnold and Clinton, Major 
Andre was captured by Paulding and his rough but incorruptible fellows. 
Andre's personal charm and youth created a feeling of sympathy for him, but it 
cannot be for a moment denied that he was justly tried and executed, in accor- 
dance with the law of nations. Had Arnold's attempt succeeded, it is more 
than likely that the blow dealt our cause would have been fatal. His subse- 
quent service in the British army only deepened the feeling of loathing with which 
his name was heard by Americans ; while even his new allies distrusted and 
despised him, and at one time Cornwallis positively refused to act in concert 
with him. 

A bright and cheering contrast to this dark episode is that of the glorious 
victories at sea won by John Paul Jones, who not only devastated British com- 
merce, but, in a desperately fought naval battle, captured two British men-of-war, 
the; "Serapis" and the "Countess of Scarborough," and carried the new 
American flag into foreign ports with the prestige of having swept everything 
before him on the high seas. Here was laid the foundation of that reputation 
for intrepidity and gallantry at sea which the American navy so well sustained 
in our second war with Great Britain. 

As the year 1780 advanced, the campaign in the South began to assume a 
more favorable aspect. General Greene was placed in command of the 
American army and at once began a series of rapid and confusing movements, 
now attacking the enemy in front, now cutting off his communications in the 
rear, but always scheming for the advantage of position, and usually obtaining 
it. He was aided ably by " Light Horse Harry" Lee and by General Morgan. 
Even before his campaign began the British had suffered a serious defeat at 
King's Mountain, just over the line between North and South Carolina, where 
a body of southern and western backwoodsmen had cut to pieces and finally 



THE END APPROACHING. 169 

captured a British detachment of twelve hundred men. Greene followed up 
this victory by sending Morgan to attack one wing of Cornwallis's ami)- at 
Cowpens, near by King's Mountain, where again a large body of the enemy 
were captured with a very slight loss on the part of the Americans. Less 
decisive was the battle of Guilford Court House (March 15, 1 78 1), which was 
contested with great persistency and courage by both armies. At the end of 
the day the British held the field, but the position was too perilous for Corn- 
wallis to maintain long, and he retreated forthwith to the coast. General Greene 
continued to seize one position after another, driving the scattered bodies of the 
British through South Carolina and finally meeting them face to face at Eutaw 
Springs, where another equally contested battle took place ; in which, as at 
Guilford, the British claimed the honors of the day, but which also resulted in 
their ultimately giving away before the Americans and intrenching themselves 
in Charleston. Now, indeed, the British were to move into Virginia, not as 
they had originally planned, but because the more southern States were no 
longer tenable. It seemed almost as if Greene were deliberately driving them 
northward, so that in the end they might lie between two American armies. 
But they made a strong stand at Yorktown, in which a small British army 
under Benedict Arnold was already in possession and had been opposed by 
Lafayette. 

Washington, who had been watching the course of events with the keen 
eye of the master strategist, saw that the time had come for a decisive blow. 
The French fleet was sent to the Chesapeake, and found little difficulty in re- 
ducing the British force and approaching Yorktown by sea. Washington's own 
army had been lying along the Hudson, centered at West Point, ready to meet 
any movement by Sir Henry Clinton's army at New York. Now Washington 
moved southward down the Hudson into the upper part of New Jersey. It was 
universally believed that he was about to attack the British at New York. Even 
his own officers shared this belief. But with a rapidity that seems astonishing, 
and with the utmost skill in handling his forces, Washington led them swiftly 
on, still in the line toward the south, and before Clinton had grasped his inten- 
tion he was well on his way to Virginia. Cornwallis was now assailed both by 
land and by sea ; he occupied a peninsula, from which he could not escape 
except by forcing a road through Washington's united army of sixteen thousand 
men. The city of Yorktown was bombarded for three weeks. An American 
officer writes : "The whole peninsula trembles under the incessant thunderings 
of our infernal machines.'' General Rochambeau who had been placed in com- 
mand of the French forces in America, actively co-operatecl with Washington. 
The meeting of the two great commanders forms the subject of one of our 
illustrations. Good soldier and good general as Cornwallis was, escape was 
impossible. On October 19, 1 781, he suffered the humiliation of a formal sur- 



i 7 o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

render of his army of over seven thousand men, with two hundred and forty 
cannon, twenty-eight regimental standards, and vast quantities of military stores 
and provisions. When Lord North, the English Minister, heard of the 
surrender, we are told, he paced the floor in deep distress, and cried, "0 God, 

it is all over ! " 

And so it was. in fact. The cause of American independence had practi- 
tically been won. Hostilities, it is true, continued in a feeble and half-hearted 
way, and it was not until September. 1783, that the Treaty of Peace secured by 
John lay. John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin was actually signed— a treaty 
which "was" not only honorable to us, but which, in the frontier boundaries 
adopted, was more advantageous than even our French allies were inclined 
to approve, giving us as it did the territory westward to the Mississippi and 
southward to Florida. Cxreat Britain as a nation had become heartily sick and 
tired of her attempt to coerce her former colonies. As the war progressed she 
had managed to involve herself in hostilities not only with France, but with 
Spain and & Holland, and even with the native princes of India. Lord North's 
Ministry fell, the star of the younger Pitt arose into the ascendency, and 
• George the Third's attempt to establish a purely personal rule at home and 
abroad was defeated beyond redemption. 

As we read of the scanty recognition given by the American States to the 
soldiers who had fought their battles ; as we learn that it was only Wash- 
ington's commanding influence that restrained these soldiers, half starved and 
half paid, from compelling that recognition from Congress by force ; as we 
perceive how many and serious were the problems of finance and of govern- 
ment distracting the State Legislatures ; as, in short, we see the political 
disintegration and chaotic condition of affairs in the newly born Nation, we 
recoo-nize the fact that the struggle which had just ended so triumphantly was 
but die prelude to another, more peaceful but not less vital, struggle— that for 
the founding of a strong, coherent, and truly National Government. The latter 
struggle began before the Revolution was over and lasted until, in 17S7, by 
mutual concession and mutual compromise was formed the Constitution of the 
United States. 




VIEW OF THE CAPITOL, WASHINGTON 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND GOVERNMENT 
BEFORE A.ND AFTER THE REVOLUTION. 



BY FRANCIS NEWTON THORPE, Ph. D., 

of American Constitutional History, University of Pennsylv* 



At the time of the colonization of America the land of Great Britain was 
controlled, if not owned, by not more than a hundred men, and political 
privileges were exercised by less than a thousand times as many. The 
principal rights of the masses were of a civil nature. The jury trial was an 

ancient right guaranteed by Magna Charta, 
but by the union of church and state, the 
thought and the activities of the English 
people were authoritatively uniform, and 
any departure from traditional belief, 
cither in matters ecclesiastical or civil, was 
viewed with disapproval. 

But a people of so diversified a 
genius for good government as arc the 
people of Anglo-Saxon stock could not 
long remain subject to serious limitations 
on their prosperity. America was the 
opportunity for liberty, the first opportu- 
nity for the diversification of Anglo-Saxon 
energies, and for the realization ot the 
hopes of mankind. There is a uniformity 
in the development of human affairs. 
Agriculture is improved in means and 
methods by improvements in manufactures, and a larger conception of the 
nature of the State always finds response in the home comforts of the people. 
The opportunities of America caused greater comfort and happiness among 
the English people who stayed at home. 

The colonization of America by the English was after two systems, that of the 

i?3 




I-KANi N NKWTON THORI'K, I'll. D. 



174 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

commercial enterprise, that of the religious undertaking : the commercial system 
was illustrated in the Virginia enterprise, the religious undertaking, in the New- 
England. Sir Walter Raleigh had conceived of planting a colony in the Carolinas, 
but his colony, had it succeeded, would have been a repetition of an English 
shire, continuing the limitations on the common life, the limitations of property 
and condition incident to English life at the close of the sixteenth century. 
Providence saved America for larger undertakings, and though the ideas of 
Raleigh were at the foundation of the first Virginia adventure, the charter of 
1606 gave larger privileges to the adventurers than had the charter to Raleigh 
or to Gilbert of nearly a quarter of a century before ; and the first adventure 
to Virginia demonstrated that a new age had come, for the conditions of life in 
the wilderness would not permit the transplanting of the feudal system, and the 
enterprise failed because it lacked men and women who were willing to work 
and to make homes for themselves. 

The second charter of three years later gave larger inducements to embark 
"in the undertaking, but little guarantee of privilege to individuals who might 
seek their fortunes in Virginia. It was yet two years before King James 
granted the third charter empowering the little colony at Jamestown to enter 
upon the serious undertaking of local self-government. 

As soon as the instincts of the Anglo-Saxon could have room in America 
for the exercise of those persistent ideas which make the glory of the race, the 
winning of American liberty was assured. A little Parliament was called in 
Virginia, and this assembly of a score of men began the long history of free 
legislation, which, in spite of many errors, has given expression to the wishes 
of millions of men in America who have toiled in its fields, worked in its fac- 
tories, instructed in its schools, directed its finances, controlled its trade, devel- 
oped its mines, and spread its institutions westward over the continent. But the 
first victory of liberty was in the forum, not in the field. 

The ancient and undoubted rights of the people of England gave to the 
inhabitants of each borough the right to representation in Parliament, and the 
plantations in Virginia, becoming the first shires of the New World, became also 
the first units of civil jurisdiction. The planters claimed and exercised the 
right to choose deputies to meet in General Court in the colony for the purpose 
of considering the wants of the various plantations, and particularly for the pur- 
pose of levying such taxes as might be required for the general welfare. The 
long struggle for liberty in America began when the House of Burgesses in 
Virginia asserted and assumed its right to levy the taxes of the colony, to 
vote the supplies to the governor, and to control the financial affairs of the 
plantations. 

The New England settlements from Plymouth to Portland, following hard 
after the settlements in Virginia, began local government after the same model. 




BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

■75 



176 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



The town-meeting was the local democracy which examined and discussed 
freely all matters of local interest. In the town-meeting assembled the free- 
men who wrote and spoke as they thought; elected "men of their own choos- 
ing," and made laws to please themselves; chose both servants to execute 
and to administer the laws, and held their representatives responsible for their 
public service. But the local communities in New England, — the several towns, 
— soon applied the representative principle in government, and each town 

chose its deputies to meet 
with the deputies of other 
towns in General Assembly 
for the purpose of taking 
into consideration the affairs 
of the colony. 

The settlers in Salem and 
Boston, when they arrived 
with John Winthrop, had 
brought with them a Great 
Charter, transferring the gov- 
ernment from old England 
to Massachusetts, and there 
they enlarged the member- 
ship of the Company of 
Massachusetts Bay,and trans- 
formed the government into 
a representative republic. 
The inhabitants of Virginia 
had not authority to elect 
their own governor, save for 
a short time during the days 
of the Commonwealth in 
England, but for more than 
half a century the people of 
Massachusetts chose all their 
public officers and instructed them at their pleasure. The immediate responsi- 
bility of the representative of the town to the townsmen was the fundamental 
notion in the New England idea of government. 

But the representative republic, the commonwealth, of New England, was 
not composed of freemen only, for there were many inhabitants ot Massachu- 
setts who were excluded from participation in the political life of the colony. 
During the half century of government under the old charter, the people of 
Massachusetts comprised both church members and non-church members, 




THE LIBERTY BELL, AS EXHIBITED AT THE NEW ORLEANS EXPOSITION. 



THE STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY. 177 

but only the church members were eligible to public office. Persons dis- 
senting from the congregational polity in church and state, persons not 
communicants in the orthodox establishment, were excluded from direct 
participation in the government ; the)' could not vote, they could not hold 
office, their children could not be baptized. When Charles II caused the 
forfeiture of the Massachusetts charter in 1684, although the liberty of 
Massachusetts seemed greatly endangered, yet a nearer approach to the 
definition of liberty was made ; for the careless King, in order to win approval 
of his procedure among the colonists, had already intimated his desire to 
enlarge the franchise in Massachusetts, and to open the privileges of freedom 
more liberally to the inhabitants of the colony. This proposition to enlarge 
the liberties of the inhabitants met with disfavor among the conservatives, and 
the voice of the established church in the colony was raised against the in- 
novation. 

In spite, however, of the limitations on the political rights of the inhabitants 
of Massachusetts, their civil rights were carefully guarded and freely exercised. 
It should be observed that throughout the history of America the ancient civil 
rights under Anglo-Saxon institutions have generally been carefully observed. 

The winning of liberty in America has been largely the liberty of exercising 
political rights, until it has become common to estimate all privileges in America 
by the standard of political freedom. We should not forget that there are other 
rights than those political ; there are moral, civil, and industrial rights, whose 
exercise is as important for the welfare of the citizen as is the exercise of rights 
political. 

The winning of civil independence is the glory of the barons of 12 15 ; for 
it was impossible for them to win civil rights for themselves without winning 
civil rights for the whole nation, and the application of the principle for which 
they struggled was necessarily universal, so that the humble tenant of the 
landed estate must participate in the privileges of civil liberty. 

The New England colonists, moving westward and southwestward over the 
domain which we call New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, 
spread the customs of civil privilege and carried with them the constitution of 
government to which they had been accustomed. Williams, in Rhode Island, 
attempted a pure democracy, which in its early days was a tumultuous assem- 
blage, but taught by experience became a happy and prosperous community. 
Connecticut, differing but slightly in its colonial ideas from those of Massachu- 
setts, was empowered by its liberal charter of 1663 to become almost an 
independent commonwealth. The whole spirit of the New England people in 
government was to exercise liberty in civil affairs and a qualified liberty in 
political affairs. The civil rights of the inhabitants of New England down to 
the time of the Revolution were quite uniform, but their political rights were 



i;8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

determined by qualifications of property, of religious opinion, of sex, of age, 
and of residence. 

The old English idea of political right carried with it similar qualifications, 
and the conservative \ irginians, like the conservative people of New England, 
could not conceive of citizenship apart from a landed estate and established re- 
ligious opinions. Were we to use the language of our day we should say that 
the voter in colonial times was required, whether citizen of a northern or of a 
southern colony, to subscribe to a creed and to possess an acreage. At a time 
when land was to be had without cost, save of labor and cultivation, the qualifica- 
tion of real property was not a heavy burden, and so long as the earnest judg- 
ment ol the majority ot the inhabitants favored the supremacy of any ecclesiastical 
system, conformity to that system was equally easy ; but as soon as free investi- 
gation of the questions of church and state became the spirit of the age, there 
would necessarily follow modification in the requirements for citizenship, and the 
qualifications for an elector would necessarily change. 

In all the charters establishing colonial governments there was inserted a 
provision that the legislation permitted to the colonial Assemblies created by the 
charters should be as nearly as may be according to the laws of England. This 
provision recognized the necessity for a liberal interpretation of legislative grants 
to the colonial Assemblies. Isolated from the home government and left to 
themselves, the colonists learned the habits of self-government and they made 
most liberal interpretations of their charters. The House of Burgesses in Vir- 
ginia and its successors throughout the land construed the privileges of legisla- 
tion practically as the admission of their independence, and colonial legislation 
was a departure from parliamentary control. 

The local American Assemblies, the colonial legislatures, were composed 
ot two branches : the upper, consisting of the governor and his council ; the 
lower, of the representatives, or delegates, from the counties or towns. The 
latter, after the manner of the English burgesses, the representatives of the 
counties and towns in the colony, took control of the taxing power in America. 

England, by her navigation laws, compelled the colonies to transport all 
their productions in English ships, manned by Englishmen and sailing to 
English ports ; no manufacturing was allowed in the colonies, and inter-colonial 
trade was discouraged. The immediate consequence of the navigation acts, 
which to the number of about thirty were passed from time to time in the British 
Parliament, was to keep the colonies in an agricultural condition, to strip them 
ot gold and silver coin, and to leave them to their own devices to find substi- 
tutes for money ; for, unable to manufacture the articles they needed, they were 
obliged to buy these articles principally in England, and to pay for them either 
with the raw productions which they exported or with coin, and the exportation 
of coin from the colonies was relatively as great as the exportation of produce. 




ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 
17" 



i So 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Money is the instrument of exchange and the means of association ; the 
colonists were compelled to exchange, and to seek that economic association 
which is the assurance and the health of civil life. 




REAR VIEW HI' IMil I'l MH M.'E HALL, PHILADELPHIA. 



The people were constantly clamoring for more money and for the issuing 
of a circulating medium. Massachusetts, in the middle of the seventeenth 
century had set up a mint, which coined a small quantity of shillings ; but the 



ISSUE OF PAPER MONEY. 1S1 

mint was a trespass upon the sovereign right of the king and had no 
legal standing in the kingdom. The colonists, therefore, soon entered upon 
the experiment of making substitutes for money. Paper money, in a great 
variety of forms, was issued by the colonial Assemblies, and the issues were 
made chiefly for local circulation. The paper money of New Jersey circulated 
in New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and to a less amount as the distance 
from New Jersey increased. New England money was little known in the 
southern colonies, and the paper issues of the Carolinas were rarely seen in 
New York. There was no acquaintance, no public faith common to the colonies, 
and although sanguinary laws were made to maintain the value of paper issues, 
there is evidence that counterfeits were almost as common as the original bills. 

So long as the issue of paper money was limited, and the colony which is- 
sued it had perfect faith in its value, the issue circulated, though its value con- 
stantly tended to depreciate throughout the colony ; but there was no unit ot 
measure, no fixed standard of values, and it was quite impossible to fix the 
value of the issue in one colony by that of any issue in another colony. By the 
time the American Revolution was passed, the over-issue of paper moneys was 
evident to all thoughtful people, but there was no production of gold or 
silver ; there was little export of commodities which brought in coin, and the 
Legislatures of the various States — for so the General Assemblies of the colonies 
had now become — were compelled to enter upon a course of legislation, having 
in view the maintenance of a truly valuable circulating medium. 

Another great question had meantime been brought forward : the relation 
of the local communities to the common or general government. As early as 
1643 the New England colonies, comprising committees of "like membership 
in the church," had consolidated for the purpose of defense and general wel- 
fare, and the principle which led to the union was the principle which led to the 
"more perfect union" of a hundred and thirty years later. If any change 
should come over the colonies by which the people should become like minded, 
as were the inhabitants of the New England colonies in 1643, then a union of 
the people of the colonies could be made. One of the causes which led to the 
American Revolution was this latent but powerful tendency in the colonies 
toward a common understanding of their character, conditions, and wants. 

The local Assemblies of the colonies had assumed unto themselves gradu- 
ally what may be called the prerogatives of legislation. They enacted laws on 
the whole range of subjects political, industrial, social, and ecclesiastical. They 
did not hesitate to attempt to solve any of the questions which arose from time 
to time, and as they attempted the solution of the economic questions of the 
colonies, they departed further and further from the strict interpretation of their 
charters, and made laws less and less "as near as may be conformable to the 
laws of England." But the Assemblies were uniform in claiming and in exercis- 



1 82 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ing the right of levying taxes. As delegates of the people, they assumed the 
exclusive right of distributing the burden of the State upon the inhabitants. 
This assumption was never acknowledged by the King or by Parliament ; for it 
was an assumption which denied the sovereignty of the King, and the su- 
premacy of Parliament in legislation. The liberty to levy taxes was the greatest 
privilege in practical government claimed by the Americans of the colonial era, 
and the winning of colonial independence was the victory of freedom in 
taxation. 

While the latent tendency in the colonies was undoubtedly toward union, it 
may be said that there never existed colonies which exhibited stronger tendencies 
to diversity than the English colonies in America. The whole range of American 
life was toward individualism, and the freedom from those restrictions which 
ever characterize older communities favored the tendency. As the New 
England people went into the west, planting civil institutions in New York 
and along the southern shores of the Great Lakes, the individualistic 
tendencies in religion, in politics, in education, and invention strengthened 
with every wave of population. As the Virginians and the Carolinians passed 
over the mountains, they also were strengthened in their individualistic 
notions, and the founders of Kentucky and of Tennessee, while following their 
instincts and the customs of the tide-water region whence they came, enlarged 
upon their notions, and organized government under more liberal provisions 
than those which prevailed eastward over the mountains. While the continental 
troops were winning the victories of the Revolution, the settlers in the State of 
Franklin were claiming independence. 

It is an error to suppose that the people of the colonies were unanimous 
in demanding independence, or that the majority of them supported the idea 
or, it may be said, ever understood its true meaning. The thirteen Colonies 
entered upon the struggle at a time when the United Kingdom was unable to 
compel them to submit to the legislation of Parliament. England possessed 
no great soldiers who could direct her armies in America ; the colonies were 
therefore free to convert all the advantages of their isolation into a strong 
self-defense. Colonial legislation had isolated them, the imperfect facilities 
in transportation isolated them, and the whole tendencies of colonial institu- 
tions strengthened them in this isolation. 

The assumption of the taxing power by the Lower House in the several 
colonies, and its persistent exercise for more than a century and a half, neces- 
sarily brought Parliament and the local Assemblies into collision. The Navi- 
gation Acts and the Stamp Act were financial measures of Parliament for the 
purpose of raising an imperial revenue in the colonies. A clearer idea is 
gained of the reasons for the hostility against this Parlimentary measure when 
we reflect that no common taxing power was known to the colonists ; the 



1 84 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

local Legislature of each colony was supreme within its jurisdiction ; a propo- 
sition for a continental power which could levy a tax for continental pur- 
poses had never been entertained by the colonists and they would have 
resented a proposition emanating- from among themselves for continental tax- 
ation quite as quickly as they resented the proposition in Parliament to levy 
a tax on tea. The continuous legislation of the local Assemblies had taught 
the Americans to believe that local interests were supreme. It can now be 
seen that the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax operated to compel the colonies 
toward the union which they would in all probability never have made of 
themselves without this external pressure. 

The throwing overboard of the tea in Boston harbor is a picturesque 
incident in American history, because it stands for the fundamental idea of 
American right — the right of the taxpayer to levy taxes through his represent- 
ative. 

As soon as Parliament closed the port of Boston, a latent tendency in 
American affairs was displayed in various parts of the country, and nowhere 
more clearly than in Virginia, where Patrick Henry, in an address to the Con- 
vention of delegates, with vision enlarged by the tendency of affairs, declared 
the relations of the colonies to the home government. Petitions, remonstrances, 
supplications, and prostrations before the throne had been in vain; "the 
inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending," the privi- 
leges of independent colonial taxation and of choosing delegates to levy the 
taxes, could be preserved only by war ; "three millions of people armed in the 
holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are 
invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us." For the first 
time Massachusetts and Virginia were united in a common sense of danger, 
and the danger consisted chiefly in the denial of the right of the local legisla- 
ture, chosen by qualified electors, to levy a tax, and the assumption of the 
exclusive right of the British Parliament to levy a continental tax directly, 
ignoring the popular branch of the colonial Legislatures. 

From a consideration of colonial finances it seems clear that the Americans 
were' not so unwilling to pay a trifling duty on tea, on legal papers, and on 
painters' material, as they were to admit the right of the British Parliament itself 
to levy the tax. Had the proposition to tax America embodied a provision that the 
tax should be levied by the local Legislatures, the American Revolution would 
have' been long delayed. It cannot be said that the Americans would have 
accepted representation in Parliament as a compensation for the tax. The first 
Declaration of Rights, in i 765, had settled that point. The American colonists 
were English subjects, and entitled to all the rights and liberties of natural born 
subjects within the kingdom of Great Britain, and, exercising the undoubted 
rights of Englishmen they insisted " that no tax be imposed on them but with 



THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY. 185 

their own consent, given personally or by their representatives," and " that the 
people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances cannot be, 
represented in the House of Commons in Great Britain," and "that the only 
representatives of the people of these colonies are persons chosen therein by 
themselves, and that no taxes ever have been or can be constitutionally 
imposed on them but by their respective Legislatures." All supplies to 
the crown were " the free gifts of the people." The claim of the Americans 
at that time might be illustrated if the people of the United States should 
now insist that the revenue for the National Government should be 
collected through the lower branch of the State Legislatures, but to make 
the illustration go on all fours we should have to suppose that the people 
of the several States were not represented and did not care to be represented 
in Congress. 

The objection to an imperial tax involved the whole issue of the war, for it 
involved the fundamental idea of government in America, the idea of represen- 
tative government. It was* not representation of the Americans in the British 
parliament, it was the representation of the Americans in their own Legislatures. 
One of the tests of independence is the possession of the right to levy taxes ; 
if England withdrew her claim to levy a continental tax directly through Parlia- 
ment, the independence of the colonies was at once acknowledged. It is evident 
then that the question of taxation goes to the foundation of American institu- 
tions, and from the time of the calling of the House of Burgesses in 161 9 unto 
the present hour, the definition of liberty in America has depended upon the 
use or the abuse of the taxing power. As soon as the Continental Congress 
attempted to levy a tax, it became unpopular. 

The time from the revolt against the stamp duties in 1775 to the inaugura- 
tion in 1 789 of the National Government under which we live has been called 
the critical period of American history. It was a period which displayed all the 
inaptitude of the Americans for sound financiering. There is hardly an evil in 
finances that cannot be illustrated by some event in American affairs at that 
time. The Americans began the war without any preparation, they conducted 
it on credit, and at the end of fourteen years three millions of people were five 
hundred millions of dollars or more in debt. The exact amount will never be 
known. Congress and the State Legislatures issued paper currency in unlimited 
quantities and upon no security. The Americans were deceived themselves in 
believing that their products were essential to the welfare of Europe, and all 
European nations would speedily make overtures to them for the control of 
American commerce. It may be said that the Americans wholly over-estimated 
their importance in the world at that time ; they thought that to cut off 
England from American commerce would ruin England ; they thought that 
the bestowal of their commerce upon Prance would enrich Prance so much 



1 86 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

that the French King, for so inestimable a privilege, could well afford to loan 
them, and even to give them, money. 

The doctrine of the rights of man ran riot in America. Paper currency 
became the infatuation of the day. It was thought that paper currency Would 
meet all the demands for money, would win American independence. Even so 
practical a man as Franklin, then in France, said: "This effect of paper cur- 
rency is not understood on this side the water ; and, indeed, the whole is a 
mystery even to the politicians, how we have been able to continue a war four 
years without money, and how we could pay with paper that had no previously 
fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it. This currency, as we manage 
it, is a wonderful machine : it performs its office when we issue it ; it pays and 
clothes troops and provides victuals and ammunition, and when we are obliged 
to issue a quantity excessive, it pays itself off by depreciation." 

If the taxing power is the most august power in government, the abuse of 
the taxing power is the most serious sin government can commit. No one 
will deny that the Americans are guilty of committing most grievous financial 
offenses during the critical period of their history. They abused liberty by 
demanding and by exercising the rights of nationality, and at the same time by 
neglecting or refusing to burden themselves with the taxation necessary to 
support nationality. 

It has long been the custom to describe the American Revolution as a 
righteous uprising of an abused people against a cruel despot ; we were 
taught in school that taxation without representation was tyranny, and that our 
fathers fought the war out on this broad principle. Much of this assumption 
is true, but it is also true that the winning of American independence was not 
complete until Americans had adequately provided for the wants of nationality 
by authorizing their representatives in State Legislatures and in the Congress 
of the United States to support the dignity which liberty had conferred, by an 
adequate system of common taxation. We now consider the American Revolu- 
tion as the introduction to American nationality. 

The hard necessities which brought the Americans to a consciousness of 
their obligations, led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Phila- 
delphia in 1787. If the liberty of self-government was won by the war, it was 
secured by the Constitution ; for the first effort toward a national government, the 
old Confederation, utterly failed, for lack of a Supreme Legislative, a Supreme 
Executive, and a Supreme judiciary. The government under the Articles of 
Confederation broke down wholly in its effort to collect money. This collapse of 
the Confederation emphasized the difference between the theory and the admin- 
istration of government, for the articles of Confederation and the Declaration 
of Independence emanated from two committees appointed the same day : 
the report of one committee was the Declaration of Independence, which was 




DANIEL WEBSTER. 
I8 7 



1 88 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

debated but little and universally adopted a few days after it was reported ; 
the report of the other committee, the Articles of Confederation, was debated 
in Congress for more than a year and in the State Legislatures for nearly five 
years, and when at last adopted, it was found that the Articles were wholly 
inadequate for the wants of the people. The reason for the different fate of 
these two instruments is clear ; the Declaration formulated a theory of gov- 
ernment, it created no officers, it called for no taxes, it stated in a pleasing 
form opinions common to thoughtful men in the country, it formulated a 
pleasing theory for the foundation of government. On the other hand the 
Articles attempted to provide for the administration of government, it estab- 
lished offices and it called for taxes, and necessarily provoked support and 
hostility ; for while men might agree as to the common theory of government in 
America, they speedily fell to differing about the methods of civil administration. 

The inability of the Congress of the Confederation to legislate under the 
provisions of the Articles compelled their amendment ; for while the exigencies 
of war had forced the colonies into closer union, — a " perpetual league of friend- 
ship," they had also learned additional lessons in the theory and administration 
of local government, for each of the colonies, with the exception of Connecticut 
and Rhode Island, had transformed colonial government into government under 
a constitution. The people had not looked to Congress as a central power, 
they considered it as a central committee of the States. The individualistic 
tendencies of the colonies strengthened when the colonies transformed them- 
selves into commonwealths. 

The struggle, which began between the thirteen colonies and the imperial 
Parliament, was now transformed into a struggle between two tendencies in 
America : the tendency toward sovereign commonwealths and the tendency 
toward nationality. The first commonwealth constitutions did not acknowledge 
the supreme authority of Congress ; there was yet lacking that essential bond 
between the people and their general government, the power of the general 
government to address itself directly to individuals. Interstate relations in 
1787 were scarcely more perfect than they had been fifteen years before. The 
understanding of American affairs was more common, but intimate political 
association between the commonwealths was yet unknown. The liberty of 
nationality had not yet been won. A peculiar tendency in American affairs 
from their beginning is seen in the succession of written constitutions, instru- 
ments peculiar to America. The commonwealths of the old Confederation 
demonstrated the necessity for a clearer definition of their relations to each 
other and of the association of the American people in nationality. 

A sense of the necessity for commercial integrity led to the calling of the 
Philadelphia Convention to amend the old Articles, but when the Convention 
assembled it was found that an adequate solution of the large problem of 



STRUGGLE BETWEEN NATIONAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS. 189 

nationality compelled the abandonment of the idea of amending the Articles 
and the formulation of a new constitution. As the Convention proceeded to 
frame the Supreme Law of the land, it moved in accord with the whole 
tendency of American affairs, establishing a National Government upon the 
representative idea, organizing a tripartite government, a Supreme Executive, 
a Supreme Legislative, and a Supreme Judiciary. 

In the organization of the legislative department the representative idea 
was expressed in the Congress ; the Upper House of which represented 
the commonwealths as corporations ; the Lower House representing the 
people as individuals. Liberty in America received a more perfect definition in 
this arrangement ; for had representation been based wholly on that which 
created the Senate or on that which created the House of Representatives, 
representation would not have been equitable. But the equities of representation 
were preserved by establishing two houses. In creating two houses, however, 
the peculiar power of the lower branch of the colonial Legislatures was con- 
tinued by giving to the national House of Representatives the sole power " to 
lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, and to pay the debt, and 
provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States." 
The complaint against the tea tax can never be raised against any tax levied by 
Congress, for the members of the House of Representatives are elected directly 
by the taxpayers, and the right of individual representation was forever secured. 

Not only does the National Constitution guarantee this individual immu- 
nity. — the right of representation, but it also guarantees all the civil rights now 
known to civilized society. The " rights of man " so frequently on the lips of 
Americans of the Revolutionary period are defined in our National Constitution, 
particularly in the amendments which forever warrant to the citizens of the 
United States all that range of constitutional liberty which assures the largest 
definition of civil life. Freedom of speech and of conscience, the right of jury 
trial, exemption from unreasonable searches and seizures, the reservation to 
the people of all powers not delegated by them, the sovereignty of freedom as 
universally declared in the abolition of slavery, and the exercise of the franchise, 
show how the definition of liberty has become more and more perfect in the 
United States during the century. 

But the people who were capable of receiving a National Constitution 
like our own would not long endure the constitutions of commonwealths 
which fixed unreasonable limits on the rights of citizens. The first State consti- 
tutions were less liberal in their provisions than the National Constitution ; 
nearly all of them limited the electorate in the commonwealth to a small body 
whose holding of real estate and whose religious notions were in accord with 
the conservative ideas of the colonial time. At the time of the making of the 
National Constitution, the property required of an elector varied in the dif- 



1 9 o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ferent commonwealths. In New Jersey, he must have property to the value of 
fifty pounds, in Maryland and the Carolinas an estate of fifty acres, in Delaware 
a freehold estate of known value, in Georgia an estate of ten dollars or follow 
a mechanic trade ; in New York, would he vote for a member of Assembly 
he must possess a freehold estate of twenty pounds, and if he would vote for 
State Senator, it must be a hundred. Massachusetts required an elector to 
own a freehold estate worth sixty pounds or to possess an annual income of 
three pounds. Connecticut was satisfied that his estate was of the yearly value 
of seven dollars, and Rhode Island required him to own the value of one 
hundred and thirty-four dollars in land. Pennsylvania required him to be a 
freeholder, but New Hampshire and Vermont were satisfied with the payment 
of a poll-tax. 

The number of electors was still further affected by the religious opinions 
required of them. In New Jersey, in New Hampshire, in Vermont, in Connecticut, 
and in South Carolina, no Roman Catholic could vote ; Maryland and Massa- 
chusetts allowed "those of the Christian religion " to exercise the franchise, but 
the " Christian religion " in Massachusetts was of the Congregational Church. 
North Carolina required her electors to believe in the divine authority of the 
Scriptures ; Delaware was satisfied with a belief in the Trinity and in the 
inspiration of the Bible ; Pennsylvania allowed those, otherwise qualified, to 
vote who believed "in one God, in the reward of good, and the punishment of 
evil, and in the inspiration of the Scriptures." In New York, in Virginia, in 
Georgia, and in Rhode Island, the Protestant faith was predominant, but a 
Roman Catholic, if a male resident, of the age of twenty-one years or over, 
could vote in Rhode Island. 

The property qualifications which limited the number of electors were 
higher for those who sought office. Would a man be governor of New Jersey 
or of South Carolina, his real and personal property must amount to ten thou- 
sand dollars ; in North Carolina to one thousand pounds ; in Georgia an estate 
of two hundred and fifty pounds or of two hundred and fifty acres of land ; in 
New Hamsphire of five hundred pounds ; in Maryland of ten times as much, of 
which a thousand pounds must be of land ; in Delaware he must own real 
estate ; in New York it must be worth a hundred pounds ; in Rhode Island, 
one hundred and thirty-four dollars ; and in Massachusetts a thousand pounds. 
Connecticut required her candidate for governor to be qualified as an elector, 
as did New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. In all the com- 
monwealths the candidate for office must possess the religious qualifications 
required of electors. 

From these things it followed that the suffrage in the United States was 
limited when, after the winning of American independence, the Constitution of 
the United States was framed and the commonwealths had adopted their first 



i 9 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

constitutions of government. It may be said that in 1787 the country was 
bankrupt, America was without credit, and that of a population of three million 
souls, who, by our present ratio, would represent six hundred thousand voters, 
less than one hundred and fifty thousand possessed the right to vote. African 
slavery and property qualifications excluded above four hundred thousand men 
from the exercise of the franchise. It is evident then, at the time when 
American liberty was won, American liberty had only begun ; the offices of the 
country were in the possession of the few, scarcely any provision existed for 
common education, the roads of the country may be described as impassable, 
the means for transportation, trade, and commerce were feeble. If the struggle 
for liberty in America was not to be in vain, the people of the United States 
must address themselves directly to the payment of their debts, to the enlarge- 
ment of the franchise, to . improvements in transportation, and to the creation, 
organization, and support of a national system of common taxation. It is these 
great changes which constitute the history of this country during the present 
century. 

By 1830 the people had moved westward, passing over the Appalachian 
mountains whose forests had so long retarded the movements of population, 
and having reached the eastern edge of the great central prairie, they rapidly 
sj >read over the Northwest Territory, successively founding the five great com- 
monwealths which were created north of the river Ohio. This vast migration 
of not less than five millions of people carried westward the New England idea 
of government modified by the ideas prevailing in New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, 
and in New York. Along the highway which extends from Boston to Chicago 
sprang up a cordon of thrh ing towns which have since become prosperous cities. 
The school-house, the church, and the printing-press were at the foundation of 
the civil structure. 

The forests of western New York, in the first decade of the century, were 
burned in order to clear the land, and from the ashes were made the pearlash 
or "salts," which, after great labor, were delivered in Canada or at Pittsburgh, 
and the silver money in payment was returned as taxes and for payment of the 
homestead. A generation later and the pine forests of New York were no 
longer burned, but among them were built innumerable mills which speedily 
transformed them into lumber which, floated down the Genesee, found an outlet 
in the Erie Canal, and a market in New York. The great canal of 1826 be- 
tween Albany and Buffalo brought the Northwest to the market of the Atlantic 
seaboard, and raised the value of land, of labor, and of all productions through- 
out the northern States. 

By this time too the children of the Old Dominion had passed over the 
mountains and had located plantations in Kentucky and in Missouri, and the 
territory south of the river Ohio had become a region of prosperous communities. 



SI r FFRAGE < >l r ALIFR ', I TI( W. 



1 >3 



About the time of the building oi the Erie Canal, property qualifications 
had disappeared from nearly all the American commonwealths. Ii was in [829, 
in the Convention of Virginia, called to frame a new Constitution for the people 




STATU* OF LIHERTY IN NEW YORK HARHOR. 
(Presented to the United State* /; Bartholdi) 



of that commonwealth, that one of the last debates in America discussed tin- 
retention o| the property qualification. It was said in that Convention, by 
President Monroe, "My object is to confine the elective! franchise to an interest 
in land ; to some interest of modi-rate value in the territory of the Common- 
13 



i 9 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

wealth. What is our country ? Is it anything more than our territory ; and why 
are we attached to it ? Is it not the effect of our residence in it, either as the 
land of our nativity or the country of our choice, our adopted country ; and of 
our attachment to its institutions ? And what excites and is the best evidence of 
such attachment ? Some hold in the territory, which is some interest in the 
soil, something that we own, not as passengers or voyagers who have no prop- 
erty in the State and nothing to bind them to it ; the object is to give firmness 
and permanency to our attachment, and these (the property qualification) are the 
best means by which it may be accomplished." 

The conservative opinions of the distinguished Monroe were supported 
by the Convention and the Constitution framed for Virginia at that time 
required of the elector that he should be a white male citizen of the Common- 
wealth, twenty-one years of age and upward, and possess "an estate of freehold 
in land of the value of twenty-five dollars." 

By the middle of the century public opinion had changed the provisions in 
the State Constitutions and abolished the property qualification of the elector : 
this limitation on citizenship disappeared about thirty years after the disappear- 
ance of the religious qualifications. From the introduction of government into 
the colonies these two qualifications had been intimately associated together. 

But liberty was not complete so long as the right to vote was limited to 
"free male white citizens." The history of the winning of universal suffrage is 
the history of the United States till the thirtieth of March, 1870, when the right 
of citizens of the United States to vote, a right that cannot be denied or 
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or 
previous condition of servitude, was proclaimed in force by Hamilton Fish, 
Secretary of State in the administration of President Grant. 

With this provision inserted in the Constitution of the United States, all 
commonwealth constitutions at once, as subordinate to the Supreme Law of 
the land, were made to conform, and although the National Constitution did 
not give the right to vote, it led practically to the admission of male persons of 
any race or color or from a previous condition of servitude to the body of the 
American electorate. Universal suffrage, against which earnest patriots like 
Monroe had at one time raised their voices, at last became the common 
condition of American political life. The struggle for liberty of 1776 was not 
ended as an effort to realize the "political rights of man " until 1870. 

Within recent years the Union has become a Union of forty-four States. The 
stream of population which has developed this Union has moved in three great 
currents. The northern current is from New England, New York, and Pennsyl- 
vania, along the line of the forty-second parallel. In the early years of the century 
this course was a convergence of smaller streams from various parts of New 
England at Albany, thence westward along the bridle path to Utica, Syracuse, 



WESTWARD STREAM OF POPULATION. 195 

Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, and Chicago. The " main road " from Boston 
to Chicago is the original line of this current, which by reason of the increase in 
travel and transportation has been paralleled successively by the Erie Canal, by 
sail-boat and steam-boat lines on the Great Lakes, and later by several railroad 
lines ; the New York Central, the West Shore, the Lake Shore and Michigan 
Southern, the Canada Southern, and their connecting lines at Chicago, with the 
Trunk lines of the Northwest, have given to the entire northern half of the 
United States a uniform and distinct character in their customs and laws. The 
width of this northern stream is plainly marked by the northern boundary of the 
United States, and by the varying line of settlements on the southern edge, of 
which the principal are from Trenton, New Jersey, to Eranklin in Pennsylvania ; 
Columbus, Ohio ; Indianapolis, Indiana ; Springfield, Illinois ; the southern 
boundary of Iowa, Kansas City, and thence westward in scattered settlements, 
including a portion of northern California, northern Oregon, and northern 
Washington. All the States within this area have been settled by people from 
the older eastern States, especially from New England, New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. 

The second current of population, which may be called the Virginia 
cu r rent, moved westward and southwestward over the area extending from 
the Potomac river and the northern boundary of North Carolina on the east, 
and widening as it coursed westward to the Ohio river on the north, including 
the State of Missouri, the southern portion of Kansas and Colorado, and thence 
to the Pacific, excluding the greater part of northern California. The southern 
boundary of this stream extended from the Carolinas southwestward, but in- 
cluded the greater part of Georgia, Alabama, and the States and Territories 
directly west of the eighty-third meridian (Pittsburg) and from the thirty-first 
to the forty-first parallel. Within this area the States as settled have con- 
tributed to the population of the States immediately west of them, imparting 
uniformity to the government and institutions of the States and Territories 
within this zone of settlements. 

The third and more recent line of movement has been along the Atlantic 
seaboard, beginning at various ports on that line, but especially at ports re- 
ceiving large numbers of immigrants ; continuing from town to town along that 
line from Portland Maine, to New Orleans and the eastern towns of Florida, 
and also Galveston and Austin, Texas, and thence westward into the Territories 
of New Mexico and Arizona, into southern California, and thence northwest- 
ward into Oregon, Washington and Montana. This line of the movement of 
population has been marked since 1865 and has been intensified and widened 
by the rapid construction of railroads. 

Along the northern or New England line of settlements have also moved 
the millions of immigrants from European countries in the corresponding latitude: 



196 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

from Germany, from Scandinavia, from Austria, from Russia, and from the 
British Isles. Along the middle or Virginia line moved a native population, 
chiefly from the older southern States, which spent its force at the foot of the 
eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. The Virginia stream has been second 
in size to that of New England. The recent coast stream has combined 
Northern and Southern and foreign elements, and reaching Washington 
and Montana by a backward flow, it presents for the first time in our national 
history a meeting of northern and of southern elements north of the latitude 
of Kansas. 

With the westward movements of the millions of human beings who have 
occupied the North American continent have gone the institutions and constitu- 
tions of the east, modified in their journey westward by the varying conditions 
of the life of the people. The brief constitutions of 1776 have developed into 
extraordinary length by successive changes and additions made by the more than 
seventy Constitutional Conventions which have been held west of the original 
thirteen States. These later constitutions resemble elaborate legal codes rather 
than brief statements of the fundamental ideas of government. But these 
constitutions, of which those of the Dakotas and of Montana and Washington 
are a type, express very clearly the opinions of the American people in govern- 
ment at the present time. The earnest desire shown in them for an accurate 
definition of the theory and the administration of government proves how 
anxiously the people of this country at all times consider the interpretation of 
their liberties,' and with what hesitation, it may be said, they delegate their 
powers in government to Legislatures, to Judges, and to Governors. 

The struggle for liberty will never cease, for with the progress of civilization 
new definitions of the wants of the people are constantly forming in the mind. 
The whole movement of the American people in government, from the simple 
beginnings of representative government in Virginia, when the little Parliament 
was called, to the present time, when nationality is enthroned and mighty Com- 
monwealths are become the component parts of the "more perfect union," has 
been toward the slow but constant realization of the rights and liberties of the 
people. Education, for which no Commonwealth made adequate provision a 
century ago, is now the first care of the State. Easy and rapid transportation, 
wholly unknown to our fathers, is now a necessary condition of daily life. 
Trade has so prospered that "in the year 1891 the loan and trust companies, 
the State savings and private banks loaned in personal securities alone two bill- 
ions and sixty millions of dollars," and the accumulated wealth of the country is 
sixty billions of dollars. Newspapers, magazines, books and pamphlets are 
now so numerous as to make it impossible to contain them all in one library, 
and the American people have become the largest class of readers in the world. 

A century ago there were but six cities of more than eight thousand 



MA TERIAL GR 1 VTH. 



197 



people in this country ; the number is now four hundred and forty-three. Three 
millions of people have become seventy millions. The area of the original 
United States has expanded from eight hundred and thirty thousand square 
miles to four times that area. With expansion and growth and the ameliora- 
tion in the conditions of life, the earnest problems of government have been 
brought home to the people by the leaders in the State, by the clergy, by the 
teachers in schools and colleges, and by the press. 

But though we may be proud of these conquests, we are compelled in our 
last analysis of our institutions to return to a few fundamental notions of our 
government. We must continue the representative idea based upon the doc- 
trine of the equality of rights and exercised by representative assemblies 
founded on popular elections ; and after our most pleasing contemplation of the 
institutions of America, we must return to the people, the foundation of our 
government. Their wisdom and self-control, and these alone, will impart to our 
institutions that strength which insures their perpetuity. 

Francis Newton Thorpe. 




' iw""'^^i^^ \k '-'I'd m.m : 'Vr 



A PALM GROVE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 




CHAPTER X. 

PATHFINDERS A.ND PIONEERS. 
DANIEL BOONE. 

;OONE'S name was among the most prominent and his lite one 
of the most exciting as well as useful of the early pioneers. 
His name is indissolubly connected with Kentucky. Boone's 
father emigrated from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to North 
Carolina when Daniel was a boy. Grown to manhood, here the 
future pioneer married Rebecca Bryan, their life being such as 
was common in the backwoods settlements of that time. A 
young man marrying then did not start with a competency. 
Boone, like David Crockett, thought that when he had offered his broad hand 
and stout heart to the girl of his choice he had given her property enough to 
start with. Household furniture was of such simple pattern as could be made 
with an axe and a saw, while clothes were homespun or shaped from the 
dressed skins of animals, and dyed by utilizing the butternut and goldenrod. 
A woman's holiday costume was of her own make from first to last, and a man's 
best suit had been previously worn by a deer. 

The political troubles in North Carolina, the imposition of illegal fines and 
taxes, no doubt made many settlers besides the Boones anxious to escape to some 
more favored region. Perhaps the love for adventure, the fertility of resource, 
hardiness, accuracy of aim and coolness in danger which Boone displayed 
throughout his life was owing somewhat to the training he received during the 
Indian troubles, and especially the Seven Years' War, in which he served. How- 
ever it was acquired, we know that he developed a steady and cold character, 
with great perseverance and a remarkable love of nature. 

Boone had a forerunner, who was Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. This 
gentleman, fired by hunters' accounts of Western lands, now the State of Ten- 
nessee, started in company with Colonels Woods, Patton, and Buchanan, and a 
number of hunters and others, on an exploring tour. To them are due the names 
of the Cumberland Mountains, Gap, and River, which with one single exception 
are the only names of purely English origin in earlier Tennessee geography. 

199 



200 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

At that time Tennessee was claimed as part of Virginia, which State made 
grants of its territories. Twelve years later Dr. Walker again passed over 
Clinch and Powell's Rivers and penetrated into what is now Kentucky. Others 
followed in his footsteps as far as Tennessee and some probably into Kentucky. 
That Daniel Boone was with one of these expeditions as far back as 1760 is 
considered to have been proven by the discovery of his name carved, with a date, 
upon an old tree near the stage road between Jonesboro and Blountsville, in the 
valley of Boone's Creek, which is a tributary of the Watauga. The legend 
inscribed on the tree runs thus: " D. BOON cilled a BAR on tree in THE 
year 1 760." 




A hunter named John Finley penetrated into Kentucky some time after this 
and brought back marvelous accounts of the hunter's paradise he found there. 
Boone resolved to go into this new country. The preparations for his departure 
took time. Even homespun and deerskin had to be gotten ready; the 
necessary money for the maintenance of his family had to be provided ; and when, 
finally, all was ready, Boone shouldered his rifle and started with John Finley, 
John Steuart, Joseph Holden, James Moncey, and William Cool, to traverse a 
mountainous wilderness for several hundred miles. Our pioneer's physique at 
this time was perfect. He is described as being of full size, hardy, robust, and 
sinewy, with mild, hazel eyes. 



A FIRST VIEW OF KENTUCKY. 2Ci 

After numerous hardships, which we have not space to chronicle, the 
explorers finally stood on a mountain crest overlooking the fertile valleys 
watered by the Kentucky River. There were herds of buffalo and of deer in 
sight, and evidences of game were everywhere plenty. The country was luxuri- 
ant almost beyond description in its vegetation, and it seemed indeed, as Finley 
had described it, "a hunter's paradise." From the cane-brakes in the river 
bottoms to the forest trees that crowned the wooded hills, it appeared to be a 
land of peace and plenty. And yet this very territory had among the Indians a 




DANIEL BOONE AND HIS liRoTHER IN " HUNTERS' PARADISE. 



name of ominous import ; it was called " The dark and bloody ground." No 
one tribe made these valleys their home, although they were claimed by the 
Cherokees ; but both Cherokee, Shawnee, and Chickasaw bands occasionally 
hunted over them, and they were the scene of many bloody feuds and forest 
encounters. 

Boone and his party encamped within view of all this beauty and wealth 
of nature, in a rock-cleft over which had fallen a giant tree. This camp from 
time to time they improved and enlarged, as it remained their headquarters 
during the succeeding summer and autumn. In all that time they roamed and 



202 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

hunted freely, finding abundance of game, exploring die country thoroughly, but 
meeting with none of the red men. . 

In the autumn of i 760 Boone and John Steuart one day left their companions 
and plunged into the forest for a little longer excursion than usual. One cannot 
but imagine what the scene must have been at that season of the year in the 
forest primeval. The rich luxuriance of vegetable life and the plentiful supply 
of game must have appealed strongly to the feelings of these hunters, whose 
sense of security had not yet been disturbed by any encounters. Of all this 
domain they had literally been in peaceful possession until then. Suddenly the 
feeling of safety was rudely dissipated by the appearance of a band of Indians, 
who surprised Boone and Steuart so completely that resistance was out of the 
question, and they were taken prisoners. 

On the seventh night after the capture the Indians encamped' in a cane-brake 
and built their fire. Perhaps the fatigue of a long march made them abate 
something of their customary caution ; at all events, as they slept by the fire, 
Boone, who was always on the alert, saw his opportunity to extricate himself 
from among them and escape. Refusing, however, to abandon his companion, 
although knowing that the risk of waking him was very great, as the slightest 
noise would alarm their captors, he went to where Steuart was sleeping, and 
taking hold of him, succeeded in rousing him without noise. By morning the 
hunters were far away on their return to camp, where they arrived without being 
overtaken, only to find that Finley and the others had disappeared. They were 
never heard of again. 

Early in the next year Squire Boone, Daniel's brother, arrived with a 
companion. On their approach to camp they were sharply challenged, not 
being at once recognized ; but the meeting was naturally one of great rejoicing 
when the hermits found who their visitors were. Now, for the first time during 
his long banishment from home, Boone heard from his family, received messages 
from his wife, and learned how his boys were progressing with the little farm. 
It was not long after the arrival of Squire Boone that Boone and Steuart were 
again attacked by the Indians, and this time Steuart was killed. Following this, 
Squire Boone's companion strayed from camp and never returned. That left 
the two brothers entirely alone, and as ammunition was running low the later 
comer decided to return home and get the necessary supplies. We hardly know 
which to admire most, the courage of the man who would face the perils of that 
return journey by himself, or the fortitude of the other who remained alone in 
that wild country, infested by his enemies, where for three months he constantly 
shifted his camp to avoid discovery. From his own account of this part of his 
life we find, however, that those days which he passed alone in the wild woods 
of Kentucky, depending upon his own skill and vigilance, eluding his enemies 
and tracking his game, were far from being the least pleasant in his lite. After 



BOONE'S ACCOUNT OF HIS EXPERIENCE. 



203 



three months Squire Boone returned, and together the brothers pursued 
their calling once more, until finally, with a very thorough knowledge of the 
country and its capabilities, Daniel Boone returned to his family in North Caro- 
lina. 

Boone's account of what he had seen, of the game, the fertility of the 
country, the beauty of the mountains and rivers, and of all that had so 
impressed his own imagination, is said to have set North Carolina on fire. 




DEAI'H Oh 



And now, while the discoverer is preparing for still another start, we may 
explain the purpose of these several expeditions. As we have said, Kentucky, — 
that is, the southern part of it, — nominally belonged to the Cherokee Indians. 
It was claimed by Virginia and North Carolina and afterwards by Tennessee. 
A noted character of the day, Colonel Henderson, with several other gentlemen, 
concerted a scheme for the purchase of all that country from the Cherokees and 
the founding of an independent State or Republic, which should be called 
Transylvania. There is hardly a question that Boone's first expedition to 



204 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Kentucky and long sojourn there was undertaken in the employ of Colonel 
Henderson and his Land Company. 

The second journey was unquestionably for the purpose of negotiating with 
the Cherokees, and making all the preliminary arrangements for the purchase 
of the tract. If his report of the nature of the land induced the formation of the 
Company, he was no less successful in conducting the second part of the business. 
When he had arranged terms with the Cherokees, Colonel Henderson joined him 
on the Watauga to conclude the bargain. There he met the Indians in solemn 
conclave, took part in their council, smoked the pipe, and paid in merchandise the 
purchase-money for Kentucky, receiving from the Indians a deed for the same. 

Colonization was next in order, and Boone undertook with a party to open 
a road from the Holston River to the Kentucky River, and to erect stations or 
forts. Gathering a party for the purpose, on April ist they succeeded, after a 
laborious march through the wilderness, in the course of which they lost several 
men, in arriving at the spot where Boonesborough now stands. There they 
fixed their camp and built the foundations for a fort. Near this place was a 
salt lick. A few days after the commencement of the fort another of the party 
was killed during an attack by Indians, but after that there was no disturbance 
for some time. This was the beginning of colonization in Kentucky. It was, of 
course, commenced under the impression that the Cherokee purchase was good, 
but the validity of the deed was at once denied by the Governor of North 
Carolina and also by the Government of Virginia as well as that of Tennessee. 
Each State, however, granted to the Land Company large tracts of land on the 
same territory, so that while unsuccessful in founding an independent Republic, 
Colonel Henderson and his associates became very wealthy. For a long time 
those who were doing the actual work on the frontier, bearing the hardships and 
the brunt of battle, did not know that any question had been raised as to the 
validity of the title under the Indian purchase, and still supposed themselves to 
be engaged in the founding of a Commonwealth. 

A KENTUCKY FORT. 

A fort at that day meant a structure of a very primitive kind. Butler, in 
his History of Kentucky, says: "A fort in those times consisted of pieces of 
timber sharpened at the ends and firmly lodged in the ground. Rows of these 
pickets enclosed the desired space which embraced the cabins of the inhabitants. 
One or more block houses, of superior care and strength, commanding the sides 
of the ditch, completed the fortifications or stations, as they were called. 
Generally, the sides of the interior cabins formed the sides of the fort." 

About thirty or forty new settlers came to Boonesborough with Colonel 
Henderson, to whom Boone had written. So far the new-comers were all men. 
Before long, however, the leader returned for his own family, and others, to the 



INDIAN CAPTURES. 205 

number of twenty-six men, four women, and half a dozen boys and girls, 
accompanied him back through the Cumberland Gap. Before arriving at 
Boonesborough the little caravan separated, part of them settling at another 
point, where they built a fort of their own. Mrs. Boone and her daughters were 
the first white women to arrive at Boonesborough to settle there. Other 
settlers followed with new colonies, and these began to make Kentucky their 
home. One of the stations was called Harrod's Old Cabin ; another was Logan. 
Among the men of prominence were Simon Kenton, John Floyd, Colonel 
Richard Callaway, and other names that appear again and again in the early 
annals of the country. 

INDIAN CAPTURES. 

At the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, the Indians, excited by the 
British, greatly disturbed and harassed the new settlers, and many of the latter, 
becoming frightened or discouraged, abandoned the promised land and went 
back to North Carolina. In 1775 the settlers still kept their faith in the Chero- 
kee purchase, and holding this view, took leases from the Company, established 
courts of justice, and, through a Convention or Congress which met at Boones- 
borough made laws and provided for a militia organization. This Convention 
was the first of its kind ever held in the West. 

Among the exciting episodes of the first years in Kentucky was the capture 
of one of Boone's daughters and two of Callaway's daughters by the Indians. 
The eldest of these girls was about twenty and the youngest fourteen years of 
age. They were sitting in a canoe under the trees which overhung the opposite 
bank of the river. There they were surprised by the Indians and taken away 
before their friends at the Fort discovered their peril. This happened so near 
nightfall that pursuit was impossible, but in the morning Boone and Floyd 
started in pursuit. They surprised the Indians that day as they halted to cook, 
and killing one or two, drove the rest away. Feeling their own force too weak 
for pursuit, they were glad to return with the almost heart-broken girls. The 
account of this, affording, as it did, evidence of the renewed hostility of the 
savages, induced nearly three hundred people to return to their homes during 
the next few months. 

We cannot follow the fluctuating fortunes of the colonists or give a detailed 
account, interesting as that would be, of the incidents of border warfare. For a 
long time Kentucky was not recognized as a free State, and its people not 
acknowledged as citizens. Virginia still made claim to the territory, and yet 
when General George Clark was sent as a Representative to the Virginia House 
his claim was rejected by that party. Failing to receive recognition, Clark 
labored to obtain the independence of Kentucky as a State. This he finally suc- 
ceeded in doing, in opposition to Colonel Henderson and others. The formation 
of Kentucky politically was first as a county of Virginia. It was the bulwark of 



2o6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Virginia during the Indian troubles, and General Clark was nicknamed the 
Hannibal of the West. In 1786 the Virginia Legislature enacted the necessary 
provisions for permitting Kentucky to assume the position of a separate State 
on condition that the United States would admit her to the sisterhood, which was 
accomplished June 1, 1792. 

Daniel Boone lost all his Kentucky property through carelessness or ignor- 
ance of legal forms, and after the prosperity and growth of the new State was 
fully assured he went to Virginia to begin life over again. There he stayed until 
the accounts brought from Missouri of the rich land and good hunting there 
aroused his pioneer spirit once more, and he again emigrated to settle in Spanish 
territory. He made his home in the Femme Osage district, over which, before 
long, he became military commander with a commission from the Spanish gover- 
nor. Upon the acquisition of Missouri by the United States our backwoodsman 
again found himself stripped of his property. The Government under which he 
had been lately serving had presented him with ten thousand arpents of land (an 
arpent is eighty-five one-hundredths of an acre) to which he had neglected to 
secure or record his title. Through the intervention of the Kentucky Legisla- 
ture in the Congress of the United States by a strong memorial, Boone was 
finally put in legal possession of the land 

Only once did the great Kentucky pioneer return to the country that he 
had explored and settled, where, according to his own account, he had lost so 
much. He says : " I may say that I have verified the words ot the old Indian 
who signed Colonel Henderson's deed. Taking me by the hand at the delivery 
thereof, ' Brother,' he said, 'we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will 
have much difficulty in settling it.' My footsteps have often been marked by 
blood, and therefore I can truly subscribe to its original name. Two darling sons 
and a brother have I lost by savage hands, which have also taken from me forty 
valuable horses and abundance of cattle. Many dark and sleepless nights have 
I been a companion for owls, separated from the cheerful society of men, 
scorched by the summer's sun and pinched by the winter's cold, an instrument to 
settle the wilderness." 

Boone's death occurred in 1820 at his home in Missouri. He was then in 
the eighty-sixth year of his age. 

DAVID CROCKETT. 

David Crockett, who died the last of those who were defenders of the Alamo 
in Texas, is one of the picturesque figures in American history. David, or, as he 
is familiarly called, " Davy " Crockett was born in 1 7S6, of Irish-American parent- 
age. His boyhood was spent in his father's cabin in Tennessee, from which he 
ran away, and, after various vicissitudes, took service with a Quaker, where he 
remained until his marriage. Then, after several years of hardship, he moved to 



DAVID CROCKETT. 



207 



the Elk River country, and when the Creek War broke out he was living near 
Winchester, Tennessee. He became well known as an Indian fighter, one of 
his earliest services being in 18 13, when at Beatty's Spring he was chosen by his 
captain to act as a scout with Major Gibson to go into the Creek country and re- 
connoitre. On the first day of his journey he lost the Major, but pushed on 
with five companions lor sixty-five miles into the enemy's country, bringing back 
news of an important nature. The garrison was hastily fortified and General 




EXPLORING THE ECHO RIVER, MAMMOTH CAVE, KENTUCKY. 

Jackson summoned by express. We will not attempt to follow the details of this 
war. Crockett saw much vigorous fighting, was present at the burning of an 
Indian village (of the horrors of which he tells in his autobiography without 
the slightest apparent compunction), acted with Major Russell's "spies," and 
when he returned to his Tennessee home had quite a reputation as an Indian 
fighter. 

After the Creek War Crockett was one of those who tried to brine order out 



208 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of the chaotic state in which Tennessee society was at that time. His home was 
among a reckless set, and the organization of a temporary government was 
imperative. Upon its formation Crockett was made Magistrate. Afterwards he 
became a member of the Legislature, although one of his biographers states 
that at this time he could hardly read a newspaper. Later in life he showed the 
acquisition of more "book learning," and the best account of his life and adven- 
tures is found in the autobiography which he left. His early success as a politi- 
cian was due principally to his qualities of humor, good story-telling, hard sense, 
and true marksmanship with a rifle, a combination that is sure to win favor among 
backwoodsmen. 

Crockett served in Congress two terms, and won national reputation and 
popularity as one of the "half horse, half alligator" class. His career in Wash- 
ington was brought to an end by his quarrel with General Jackson, to whose 
party he had at first been an adherent. He then cast his lot with those who were 
battling for Texan independence, and died, as we have already noticed, with 
Travis and Bowie, at the Alamo. 

Equally important with the exploration, settlement, and conquest of Ken- 
tucky and the Southwest were the expeditions of those who found a path through 
the great mountain divide and were the forerunners of those that should after- 
wards settle the Pacific slope. 

LEWIS AND CLARK. 

Among the earliest explorers of Rocky Mountain fame were Lewis and 
Clark, who, in 1S04, were sent to command the expedition in search of the head- 
waters of the Columbia River and to mark its course. General Clark was the 
brother of George R. Clark, of whom mention has been made in an earlier part 
of this chapter. The family were from Virginia, but had become identified with 
the early history of Kentucky, and William Clark was known from his youth as 
an Indian fighter. At eighteen years of age he was made ensign, and in i 792 
became a lieutenant of infantry, being appointed in the following year adjutant 
and quartermaster. He served on the frontier until 1 796, when he resigned 
on account of ill health and went to reside in St. Louis. Seven years later 
President Jefferson offered him the rank of second lieutenant of artillery, to 
assume with Merriwether Lewis the command of the exploring expedition to the 
Columbia River. 

Lieutenant Lewis was also a Virginian, whose first service had been in 
quelling the whiskey insurrection in Western Pennsylvania, in 1 794. Afterward 
entering the regular army he rose to the rank of captain, was then private 
secretary to President Jefferson, and so won the President's respect and favor 
by his superior qualities of mind that he was appointed to the scientific and 
general command of the expedition of which we have just spoken. 



THE SOUTH PASS. 



209 



Lewis and Clark left St. Louis in the summer of 1803. They encamped for 
the winter on the bank of the Mississippi opposite the mouth of the Missouri 
River. The company included nine Kentuckians, who were used to Indian ways 
and frontier life, 
fourteen soldiers, 
two Canadian 
boatmen, an inter- 
preter, a hunter, 
and negro boat- 
man. Besides this, 
a corporal and 
guard with nine 
boatmen, were en- 
gaged to accom- 
pany the expedi- 
tion as far as the 
territory of the 
Mandans. 

The party 
carried with it the 
usual goods for 
trading with the 
Indians, looking 
glasses, beads, 
trinkets, hatchets, 
etc., and such pro- 
vision as were 
necessary for the 
sustenance of its 
members. While 
the greater part of 
the command em- 
barked in a fleet 
of three large 
canoes, the hun- 
ters and pack- 
horses paralleled 

their course along the shore. In this way, in the spring of 1804, the ascent 
of the Mississippi was commenced. In June the country of the Osao-es was 
reached, then the lands occupied by the Ottawa tribes, and finally, in the 
fall, the hunting grounds of the Sioux. Here the leaders of the expedition 




I'HE FAR WEbT — YtLLOWSTONK NATIONAL PARK. 



210 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ordered cabins to be constructed, and camped for the winter among the Man- 
dans, in latitude 27 21' north. They found in that country plenty of game, 
buffalo and deer being abundant ; but the weather was intensely cold and the 
expedition was hardly prepared for the severity of the climate, so that its mem- 
bers suffered greatly. 

In April a fresh start was made and they ascended the Missouri, reaching the 
great falls by June. Here they named the tributary waters and ascended the 
Northernmost, which they called the Jefferson River, until further navigation 
was impossible ; then Captain Lewis with three companions left the expedi- 
tion in camp and started out on foot toward the mountains, in search of the 
friendly Shoshone Indians, from whom he expected assistance in his projected 
journey across the mountains. 

A RIVER WHICH RAN TO THE WEST. 

On the twelfth of August he discovered the source of the Jefferson River in 
a defile of the Rocky Mountains and crossed the dividing ridge, upon the other 
side of which his eyes were gladdened by the discovery of a small rivulet which 
flowed toward the west. Here was proof irrefutable "that the great backbone 
of earth" had been passed. The intrepid explorer saw with joy that this little 
stream danced out toward the setting sun — toward the Pacific Ocean. Meeting 
a force of Shoshones and persuading them to accompany him on his return to 
the main body of the expedition, Captain Lewis sought his companions once 
more. Captain Clark then went forward to determine their future course, and 
coming to the river which his companion had discovered he called it the 
Lewis River. 

A number of Indian horses were procured from their red-skinned friends 
and the explorers pushed on to the broad plains of the western slope. The latter 
part of their progress in the mountains had been slow and painful, because of the 
early fall of snow, but the plains presented all the charm of early autumn. In 
October the Kaskaskia River .was reached, and leaving the horses and whatever 
baggage could be dispensed with in charge of the Indians, the command embarked 
in canoes and descended to the Columbia River, upon the south bank of which, 
four hundred miles from their starting point, they passed the second winter. 
Much of the return journey was a fight with hostile Indians, and the way was 
much more difficult than it had been found while advancing toward the West. 
Lewis was wounded before reaching home, by the accidental discharge of a gun 
in the hands of one of his force. 

Finally, after an absence of two years, the expedition returned, the leaders 
reaching Washington while Congress was in session, and grants of land were 
immediately made to them and to their subordinates. Captain Lewis was re- 
warded also with the governorship of Missouri. Clark was appointed briga- 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



dier general for the territory of upper Louisiana, and in 1813 was appointed gov- 
ernor of Missouri, holding office till that territory became a state, after which he 
retired into private life till 1822, when Mr. Monroe made him Superintendent 
of Indian Affairs, which office he successfully filled until his death. Lewis's end 
was a sad one. An inherited tendency to melancholia developed itself and 
led him, after a long and useful career, to take his own life. 

Of later, though not less 
fame, were the successors of 
Lewis and Clark in the explora- 
tion of the Rocky Mountains and 
the plains beyond. We refer to 
General Fremont and his famous 
scout, Kit Carson. It may be 
said without exaggeration that in 
all human probability the reputa- 
tion achieved by the young lieu- 
tenant and his subordinate in the 
South Pass was based upon a 
love adventure. 

When in 1840 General Fre- 
mont was a second lieutenant, 
he was called to Washington, 
and while there met and fell in 
love with Jessie, the daughter of 
Thomas H. Benton. Colonel 
Benton liked the young Lieu- 
tenant, but thought that a fifteen- 
year-old daughter was altogether 
too young to contract an engage- 
ment, and failing in other efforts, 
he is thought to have procured 
the imperative order from the 
War Department which sent 
Fremont to explore the Rocky 
Mountains. Colonel Benton's 
influence at that time was paramount in Washington. The duty assigned was 
finished by Lieutenant Fremont, perhaps more speedily than would have been 
the case under other circumstances, and upon his return the lovers were secretly 
married : but the love for adventure and exploration had been fully kindled, and 
a plan was forming in the brain of the future Pathfinder to explore the whole 
Western country, to study its topography, facilities, etc. As a part of this 




, N 1 I I 0WS1ONE NAT1 
ANh MONTANA. 



GENERAL FREMONT. 



213 



general scheme he was ordered, at his own request, to make a geographical 
survey of the Rocky Mountains, especially the South Pass. 

While engaged in this work the explorer met Kit Carson, a professional 
hunter and trapper, 
who had been for 
eight years regular 
hunter for Bent's Fort. 
Fremont at once en- 
gaged him as hunter 
and scout. Many of 
those who are inclined 
to detract from the 
reputation belonging 
to the former have 
averred that the credit 
of the discoveries 
made was mainly due 
to Carson ; but a 
knowledge of the fact 
that barometric obser- 
vations, topographical 
data, and other scien- 
tific records beyond 
Carson's capacity 
were made, and not 
only so, but excited 
the admiration and at- 
tention of foreign as 
well as American au- 
thorities, shows such 
a charge to be with- 
out foundation. Yet 
the fame of the sub- 
sequent candidate for 
the Presidency will 
always be linked with 
that of the humbler 
companion whose 
knowledge of the frontier made so much success possible. 

Carson was sent to Washington as a bearer of dispatches in 1847, arR l there 
received an appointment as lieutenant in the United States Rifle Corps. He was 




HAWANOH, THE UTE CHIEF WHO WAS SENT TO WASHINGTON IN I S63 TO TREAT 
WITH THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. 



214 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



afterward appointed Indian agent, a post for which his experience admirably fitted 
him. 

Of other Western explorers, discoverers, and pioneers we have not space 
to speak in this chapter. We have sketched the lives and deeds of a few of the 
more prominent only, indicating how the West was opened for the march of the 
millions that have come after. We honor the brave men who risked everything 
and sacrificed everything to open the way, and cannot but believe, in the words 
of Daniel Boone, that they were " instruments to settle the wilderness." 




VOLCANIC KEEPS OK ARIZONA. 




CHAPTER XI. 

PUSHING BACK THE BOUNDARIES. 

HE definitive treaty of peace between England and the United 
States, signed at Paris, France, September 3d, 1783, by the Duke 
of Manchester, and David Hartley, son of the great philosopher, 
accredited representatives of the King of Great Britain, was an 
exact transcript of the preliminary treaty which had been signed 
in the same city, November 30th, 1782, by Richard Oswald, com- 
missioner for the English Ministry, and by Benjamin Franklin, 
John Jay, and John Adams, the American commissioners. It was 
provided by that treaty that the boundary line of the United States should start 
at the mouth of the St. Croix River (named also the Passamaquoddy, and the 
Schoodic), which now divides the present State of Maine from British New- 
Brunswick, and running to a point near Lake Madawaska in the highlands 
separating the Atlantic water-shed from that of the St. Lawrence River, should 
follow those highlands to the Connecticut River and then descend the middle of 
that stream to the forty-fifth parallel of latitude ; thence running westward and 
through the centre of the water communications of the Great Lakes to the Lake 
of the Woods, and thence to the source of the Mississippi, which was supposed 
to be west of this lake. This line was marked in red ink, by Oswald, on one of 
Mitchell's maps of North America, in 1 782, to serve as a memorandum establishing 
the precise meaning of the words used in the description. It ought to have been 
accurately fixed in its details, by surveys made upon the spot ; but no commis- 
sioners were appointed for that purpose. The language relating to the north- 
eastern portion of this northern boundary line contained some inaccuracies, which 
were revealed by later surveys, and the map used by Oswald was lost. Hence 
a further question arose between Great Britain and the United States, which was 
not settled until the Ashburton treaty in 1 842. * The nominal boundaries of many 
of the colonies with which the King entered into treaty, declaring them to be 



* Critical Period of American History. By John Fiske. 1891, pp. 25, 26. 

215 



2l6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



"fret, sovereign and independent States,"* as constituted by their charters, 
extended to the Pacific Ocean, but in practice they ceased at the Mississippi 
River. Beyond that river the sovereignty, by discovery, settlement, and active 
exercise, was vested in the King of Spain. Here, therefore, was the western 
boundary line, at the Mississippi River. On the south the Spanish possessions 
ran east from that river, and took in the lower portions of the present States of 
Mississippi and Alabama, with all the present State of Florida. The eastern 
line was the Atlantic Ocean, starting from about the thirty-first parallel of latitude 
and running north and east to the St. Croix, the point of departure. 




GRANDK AVENUE. 



It requires effort for one to carry the conception of these facts in mind, and 
recall the actualities of our national existence and activity as shut within these 
lines ; — not to say to go behind them, and remember that there was then but 
very little United States to the west of the Alleghany Mountains. It is the 
aim of the present chapter to stimulate and aid this effort, pointing out 



* New Hampshire ; Massachusetts Bay; Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ; Connec- 
ticut: New York ; New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Delaware; Maryland; Virginia; North Carolina; 
South Carolina ; Georgia. 



ORDER OF ADMISSION OF THE STATES. 217 

the successive increments by which the present domain of the country took 
on its vast proportions, opening to general apprehension the simple truth 
of Berkeley's lines : — 

" Westward the course of Empire takes its way; 
The four first acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
Time's noblest offspring is the last." 

The following statements exhibit the 

ADMISSION OF STATES SINCE THE FORMATION OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT 

A. I>. 1789 IN THE ORDER OF TIME. 

Vermont 1791. 

(Formed from portions of New Vork and New Hampshire.) 

Kentucky, 1792. 

(Formed from Territory ceded to United States by Virginia.) 

Tennessee J 796. 

(Formed from Territory ceded to United States by the Carolinas.) 

Ohio, 1S02. 

(Formed from the Northwestern Territory.) 

Louisiana 1S12. 

(Formed from the Louisiana Purchase.) 

Inui \na, 1816. 

(Formed from the Northwestern Territory.) 

Mississippi, 1817. 

(Forme'd from Territory ceded to United States by Georgia.) 

Illinois, 1818. 

(Formed from the Northwestern Territory.) 

Alabama, iSiq. 

(Formed from Territory ceded to United States by Georgia.) 

Missouri 1S20. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Maine 1S20. 

(Part of Colony of Massachusetts Bay from A. D. 1651.) 

Arkansas, 1836. 

(Formed from the Louisiana Purchase.) 

Michigan, 1S37. 

(Formed from the Northwestern Territory.) 

Florida, 1S45 

(Formed from Territory ceded by Spain, 1S19.) 

Texas, 1S45. 

(Annexed by vote of United States Congress.) 

IOWA, IS46. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Wisconsin, 1848. 

(Formed from Northwestern Territory.) 



2i8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

California 1850. 

(Formed from Territory acquired from Mexico.) 

Minnesota, 1858. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase and Northwestern Territory.) 

Oregon, 1858. 

(Claimed by United States by right of prior discovery.) 

Kansas, 1861. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

West Virginia 1S63. 

(Formed after secession of Virginia, 1861.) 

Nevada, 1864. 

(Formed from territory acquired from Mexico.) 

Nebraska, 1867. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Colorado, 1871. 

Formed from Territory acquired from Mexico, and from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Montana 1889. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Washington, 1S89. 

(Claimed by United States by right of prior discovery.) 

Wyoming 1SS9. 

(Formed from 1 ouisiana Purchase.) 

North Dakota 1889. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

South Daicoi \ 1889. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

Idaho, 1890. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) * 

For the sake of completeness, let there be added to the foregoing, these 
statements concerning the 

TERRITORIES OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1S92. 

District of Columbia (organized), 1791. 

(Ceded to the United States by Maryland in 178S, and by Virginia in 1789; seat of United 
States Government located there, 1800.) 

Indian Territory (set apart), . 1830. 

(Formed from Louisiana Purchase.) 

New Mexico (organized) 1S50. 

1 Formed from Territory acquired from Mexico.) 

Utah (organized), ... ■ ■ 1S50. 

Formed from Territory acquired from Mexico.) 

Arizona (organized) 1863. 

(Formed from Territory acquired from Mexico.) 

Alaska (acquired) 1867. 

(Purchased from Russia.) 

Oklahoma (organized) 1889. 

(Formed from Indian Territory.) 



LINES OF NATIONAL GROWTH. 



219 



If we add to these statements that the forty-four States and seven Terri- 
tories which make the United States of to-day, comprise, in the aggregate, an 
area of 3,602,990 square miles, and were peopled, in 1890, by 62,049,523 souls, 
we may have some adequate ground for a just contrast between the status of 
the country at the present time, and at the time when peace was made between 
King George III, of England, and our forefathers. For then it covered but 
827,844 square miles, and had within it a population of, say, 3,000,000 persons. 
We are to trace, in some detail, the successive acquisitions out of which that 
increase has been derived which differences the United States wherein we live, 
and the United States of America at the close of the Revolution of 1775-S3. 




SEAL CATCHING IN ALASKA. 



It is, doubtless, within the knowledge of few readers outside the closer stu- 
dents of American history, that before that time the prescient mind of George 
Washington was grappling, in earnest, with one of the two questions more im- 
minent than others in the determination of that coming territorial expansion, the 
greatness and the nearness of which were both hidden from the vision of the 
men of that period. The first was the provision of lines of inter-communication 
between the whites who had settled in the Mississippi Valley, westward of the 
Alleghanies, and the inhabitants of the original thirteen States. This was essen- 
tial in case the new settlements were to be permanently held within the Union, 
and the attention of Washington had doubtless been occupied by its considera- 
tion, rather than by that of the second, upon which we shall speedily touch. For, 



220 • THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

in 1784, a tour to Pittsburg, Pa., and a personal examination of the Alleghanies, 
had convinced him that by deepening the Potomac and the James Rivers, on the 
eastern side, and the headwaters of the Ohio River, on the other side of the 
Alleghenies, canal communication between the East and West would be practi- 
cable. Probably the scheme would have offered engineering difficulties almost 
insurmountable at that time. It had really gone so far, however, as incorporation, 
in both the States of Virginia and Maryland, when Washington reluctantly 
suffered himself to be drawn away from it by the voice of the whole country, to 
the Presidency of the Convention of 1 787, and afterwards of the United States. It 
was reserved for other men to establish communications between these sections 
of the country, such in nature and in number as neither Washington or his 
contemporaries dreamed of. 

Another essential, if the emigrants then settled in the Mississippi Valley 
and those who should follow them, were to be retained in the Federal Union, was, 
plainly, that they should be relieved from existing Spanish restrictions upon the 
free navigation of the Mississippi River and its affluents. The auspicious settle- 
ment of this point was at hand, — nigher, indeed, than might have been looked for. 
It came with the acquirement by the United States, in the year 1803 of that 
which went into history under the name of "The Louisiana Purchase." 

It had been the fixed policy of Spain to exclude all foreign commerce from 
the Mississippi. Having had the ownership and control, since 1763, of the vast 
tract west of that stream, she had been so resolute in this purpose that in 1780- 
82 she refused to conclude a treaty with the United States, her main reason being 
that the United States Minister, John Jay, had then demanded the free naviga- 
tion of the river. So definite and so determined was her purpose that it was 
apparent that she designed to confine the area of the United States to the country 
east of the Alleghanies, using, for pretext, a proclamation which had been issued 
in 1763 by the King of Great Britain, in which he forbade his North American 
governors to grant lands west of the sources of the streams that fell into the 
Atlantic Ocean. By the month of July, 17S5, the claims of Spain had been 
modified to the occupation of the Floridas, all the west bank of the Mississippi, — 
the east bank to a point considerably north of the present southerly boundary 
of the State of Mississippi, — and an exclusive navigation thence to the mouth of 
the river. Her insistence upon this exclusive navigation had been so strenuous 
that by a vote of seven Northern to five Southern States, the Congress of the 
American Confederation had, in August, 1786, withdrawn all demand upon 
Spain for any share in it. Indeed, before the 6th October of that year, John Jay, 
as Secretary of the Confederation for Foreign Affairs, had agreed with Spain 
upon an article by which this claim on the part of the Americans was totally 
withdrawn for twenty-five years, although it was not formally relinquished. 

But the remonstrances and in some cases the violence, of the rapidly 



THE FRENCH CESSION. 221 

increasing' American settlers in the valley east of the Mississippi grew to such 
frequency and to such proportions, that, in 1 793, renewed, but still fruitless efforts 
were made by the United States government to secure a treaty with Spain that 
should open the river and relieve the settlers. In the year 1795, the attempt 
was once more renewed, and Thomas Pinckney, the American envoy, then suc- 
ceeded in negotiating a treaty which stipulated that navigation of the said river 
(the Mississippi) from its source to the ocean was thereafter to be free to the 
subjects of the Spanish ruler, and to the citizens of the United States, and allowed 
these same citizens "to deposit their merchandise and effects in New Orleans, 
and to export them thence, without import or export duty, for a space of three 
years. The Spanish government promised, as well, that this permission should 




EAGLE GATE OF BRIGHAM YOUNG'S SCHOOL. 

be continued, if it was found, during the three years, that the arrangement was 
not prejudicial to Spanish interests ; or, if the arrangement should not be con- 
tinued, that His Majesty would assign to American citizens, "on another part of 
the banks of the Mississippi, an equivalent establishment." And with this the 
western United States people were fairly satisfied. 

Five years subsequent to this (1800), by the third article of a secret treaty 
between Spain and France, the former ceded to the latter the whole of 
the vast province of Louisiana, so-called, stretching from the source to the 
mouth of the Mississippi River, and thence westward to the Pacific Ocean. 
As the result of this cession, the United States were thenceforth to be 
hemmed in between France and England, the " two professional belligerents 



222 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of Europe," — and toward the end of 1S01 Napoleon Bonaparte, then at the 
head of French affairs, sent from France a fleet and army intended to take 
possession of New Orleans, although they were ostensibly to operate against 
St. Domingo. The excitement in the United States which naturally followed 
this cession was increased by a Spanish order (October, 1802) abrogating the 
right of deposit secured by the Pinckney treaty of 1795, without substituting 
any place for New Orleans, and a Pennsylvania Senator introduced resolu- 
tions into the United States Congress authorizing President Jefferson to 
call out 50,000 militia and occupy New Orleans. Instead of this, however, 
Congress appropriated $2,000,000 for the purchase of that place, and 
(January, 1803) the President sent James Monroe to Paris as Minister 
Extraordinary, with discretionary powers, to co-operate with Robert R. 
Livingston, then United States Minister at the French Court, in the proposed 
purchase. A new war between France and England was on the eve of 
outbreak, and in that event the omnipotent navy of England would make 
Louisiana a more than useless possession to France. On the 11th of 
April, Livingston was invited by Napoleon to make an offer for the whole 
of the vast territory. Monroe reached Paris on the 12th, and the 
two Ministers decided to offer $10,000,000. The price was finally fixed at 
$15,000,000, one-fourth of it to consist in the assumption by the United 
States, of $3,750,000 worth of claims by American citizens against France. 
The treaty for the purchase was signed by the American Ministers and by 
Barbe Marbois, for France, April 30th (1803). 

The news came upon Spain like a thunderbolt. She filed a protest against 
it, because of the fact (as is supposed) that a secret condition that France should 
not alienate Louisiana had accompanied the Spanish cession to France in 1800. 
But her protest did not avail, and at an early session of the United States Senate, 
called for the purpose by the President, the purchase was ratified by that body 
(October 19, 1803). The acquisition of Louisiana added 1,171,931 square miles 
to the United States, comprising Alabama and Mississippi south of parallel 31 ; 
all Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Oregon, North and South 
Dakota, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota west of the Mississippi, and 
Kansas except the southwest part, south of the Arkansas ; Colorado and Wyom- 
ing east of the Rocky Mountains, and the Indian Territory, with the Territory of 
Oklahoma. This purchase of the Louisiana -Territory, first in order of time in 
the acquisition of land by the United States, was by far the largest of all that 
have succeeded it. 

The engraving, "The Banks of the Mississippi " (page 68), is a suggestion 
of the teeming commercial life, which, for many years past has grown in volume 
and importance along the sides of the great " Father of Waters " then brought 
within the national domain, and the picture of Great Salt Lake City, the capital of 



THE SPANISH CESSION. 



223 



Utah, gives a view of another noted feature in this territorial expansion, to which 
we add (page 198) a singularly graphic delineation of "The Mammoth Hot 
Springs in Yellowstone National Park," also within the limits of the purchase 
made in 1803. 

The second addition came to the country in 1819. On the 22d of February 
of that year the Spanish Minister at Washington signed a treaty, by which his 







;reat salt lake city. 



country ceded Florida, in area 59,268 square miles, to the United States in return 
for the payment by the latter country of the claims of American citizens against 
Spain, amounting to $5,000,000. The ratification of this cession was obtained 
from the Spanish Home Government in 1 82 1 . The steps leading up to the acqui- 
sition may be stated in brief: — 

At the formation of the United States Government, in 1789, Spain had 



224 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

possession of both Eastern and Western Florida, separated from each other by 
the river Appalachicola. These divisions of territory had been created by Great 
Britain in 1763, and the two, taken together, ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the 
Mississippi River. The retrocession of the Louisiana Territory to France by 
Spain, in 1800, did not convey to the latter nation any portion of Western 
Florida, and in Spanish judgment all territory east of the Mississippi and west 
of the Perdido River was a part of Western Florida. She had, therefore, set up 
a custom-house at the mouth of the Alabama River, and levied heavy duties on 
goods to or from the upper country. 

The United States, however, after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, 
in 1803, claimed that this purchase included the territory east of the Mississippi 
River as far as the Perdido, which is in our day the western boundary of the 
State of Florida; and in 1810, after the overthrow of the Government in Spain, 
and when a part of the people in Western Florida had declared themselves inde- 
pendent of Spain and had assumed nationality, President Madison sent Governor 
Claiborne, of the United States Territory of (New) Orleans, into their country, 
with a sufficient force, and took possession of it, with the exception of the fort 
and city of Mobile. In 181 2, when Louisiana came into the Union as a State, 
her eastern boundary was fixed at the Pearl River, and what remained of Western 
Florida between the Pearl and the Perdido was annexed to the Mississippi Ter- 
ritory, General James Wilkinson, General-in-Chief of the United States Army, 
taking possession of Mobile in 181 3. This left only Eastern Florida, then 
stretching from the Perdido River to the Atlantic Ocean, under Spanish rule. 

Throughout these years the purpose had grown in the Southern States to 
gain that portion of Spanish dominion, as well as Western Florida, for the United 
States. January 15th and March 3d, 181 1, the United States Congress passed, 
in secret, — and its action was not made known until 1818, — acts which authorized 
the President of the United States to take "temporary possession" of East 
Florida. The Commissioners appointed under these acts, Matthews and Mitchell, 
both Georgians, had stirred up insurrection in the coveted territory, and when 
the President (Madison) refused to sustain them, the State of Georgia formally 
pronounced Florida needful to its own peace and welfare, and practically declared 
war on its private account. But its expedition against Florida came to nothing. 
In 18 1 4, General Andrew Jackson, then in command of United States forces at 
Mobile, having, by a raid into Pensacola, driven out a British force which had 
settled there, restored the place to its Spanish authorities and retired. Four 
years after (18 18), during the Seminole War, annoyed by Spanish assistance given 
to the Indians, General Jackson again raided Eastern Florida, captured St. Marks 
and Pensacola, hung Arbuthnot and Ambrister, two Englishmen who had aided 
the Seminoles, as " outlaws and pirates," and again demonstrated the fact that 
Florida was at the mercy of the United States. It was this series of events which 



THE SPANISH CESSION. 



led to the Spanish cession already noted. And by the treaty which secured that 
cession the United States gave up any claim to Texas and the River Rio Grande, 



■ ■: v-- 



\v 




THE FOUNDERS OF LOS ANGELES. 



as its western boundary. These questions of extending territory gave occasion 
for many debates in Congress. Did space admit, it were easy to show, in some 



226 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



detail, at what an early stage in his career, Andrew Jackson, one of the most 
picturesque characters in American history, displayed, in these events, his essen- 
tial peculiarities. His 
exploits in Florida 
had stamped upon 
them the same quali- 
ties which subse- 
quently distinguished 
him. 

But attention 
must now be turned 
to the third increase 
of United States 
boundaries, in 1845, 
by the annexation of 
Texas to the United 
States by United 
States Congressional 
votes (House, De- 
cember 1 6th; Senate, 
December 23d). 

An admirable 
statement of the 
causes and methods 
by which this annexa- 
tion came about is to 
be found in the stand- 
ard " Cyclopaedia " of 
Mr. J. J. Lalor* and 
we shall condense it 
for our pages. "The 
inevitable result of 
the two previous an- 
nexations," it is de- 
clared, " was the an- 
nexation of Texas." 

IDOLS TOTEM, OK ALASKA. BetOTG ^ ^^ ^ 

Texas had been claimed by Spain. It had been one of the objects of Aaron 




* Cyclopedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the 
United States. N. Y., 1888. Vol. I, pp. 96, 97. 



ANNEXATION OF TEXAS. 227 

Burr's conspiracy in 1S06. During General Wilkinson's hasty preparations to 
defend New Orleans from that conspiracy, in October of that year, he had 
agreed with the Spanish commander upon the Sabine River as a provisional 
boundary between Spanish and American territory, and the treaty of 1819 (see 
ante) made this boundary permanent. When Mexico's revolt against Spain was 
successful, by the treaty of Cordova (1821), Texas and Coahuila became one of 
the States of the Mexican Republic. 

As early as that year, however, wild spirits in the southwestern United 
States endeavored to effect an entrance into Texas. In 1S27 and in 1S29 Henry 
Clay and Martin Van Buren, successive United States Secretaries of State, 
made offers of $1,000,000 and $5,000,000, respectively, for Texas. April 1, 
1833, Texas formed a Constitution of its own as one of the Mexican State Re- 
publics. Two years from that time the Mexican Congress abolished all State 
Constitutions and created a Dictator. Then- (March 2, 1836) Texas declared 
its own independence. In the war that ensued, Houston, the Texan General, 
defeated Santa Anna, the Mexican Dictator, at San Jacinto, Texas, April 10th 
(1836), and the latter, being taken prisoner, signed a treaty acknowledging 
Texan independence. 

Although this act of the Dictator was repudiated by Mexico, the United 
States (March, 1837) and, soon after, England, France, and Belgium recognized 
the new republic. But the finances of Texas tell into such disorder that 
annexation to the United States was really as desirable for her as for any portion 
of the States themselves, and in the month of August, 1837, by her Minister at 
Washington, she asked to be admitted into the Federal Union. Attempts were 
at once made and persistently persevered in in the United States Congress and 
by existent United States Administrations to secure her admission. The question 
of Texan annexation became a game skillfully played, in partnership, by United 
States politicians who wished to increase the number of Southern States, and 
Texas land and scrip speculators. Ex-President Andrew Jackson in a letter 
(March, 1843) warmly commended the annexation. In 1844, Martin Van Buren 
and Henry Clay alike declared against it. In the same year John C. Calhoun, 
United States Secretary of State, actually made a treaty of annexation with 
Texas, but it was rejected in the United States Senate by a vote of sixteen ayes 
to thirty-five nays. The election of James K. Polk as President, in the fall of the 
year, determined the adoption of the measure in this country, and it was consum- 
mated in 1845 by votes already stated. The unanimous assent of the Texan 
Congress had been given to annexation in June, 1845, and that assent had been 
ratified (July 4th) by a Texan popular convention. This annexation added 
376,133 square miles to the territorial area of the United States. 

For the purposes of this chapter it will suffice if we consider the fourth 
and the fifth acquisitions of territory by the United States, that of New 



228 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Mexico and Upper California (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase, so-called, 
(1853) under a single head — to be known as "the Mexican Cession." New 
Mexico and Upper California had been conquered by American Troops, the 
former by those of General S. W. Kearny, — the latter by the United 
States Navy and a small land force under Colonel John C. Fremont, — and 
both were held as conquered territory during the Mexican War. From the 
opening of hostilities, the acquisition, by force or by purchase, of a liberal 
tract of Mexican territory as "indemnity for the past and security for the 
future" had been a principal object of that war. 




GIANT TREE OF THE YOSEMITE VALLEY, IN 
CALIFORNIA. 



By the treaty of Guadalupe 
Hidalgo (February, 1848), the ter- 
ritory above named was added to 
the United States, the price fixed 
being $15,000,000, besides the as- 
sumption by the United States of 
$3,250,000 in claims of American 

citizens against Mexico. This territory, including that part of New Mexico east 
of the Rio Grande — which was claimed by Texas, and for which the United 
States afterward paid #10,000,000 to Texas, — added to the area of the 
country 545,783 square miles. Disputes which arose between the United 
States and Mexico during the next five years (1S48-1S53) as to the 
present southern part of Arizona, the Mesilla Valley, from the Gila River to 
Chihauhua, were such that a Mexican army was marched into it by Santa 
Anna, who had regained place and power, and preparations were begun 



RUSSIAN PURCHASE. 229 

for a renewal of war. By a treaty negotiated with Mexico by General 
James Gadsden, of South Carolina, in 1S53. the United States obtained the 
disputed territory by paying $10,000,000 to Mexico, and secured, as well, 
the right of the transit of United States troops, mails, and merchandise over 
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. By this annexation 45,535 square miles were 
added to the national domain. 

The accession of the Russian province of Alaska on the northwestern coast 
of North America, by purchase from that Empire, in the year 1867, was the sixth 




THI ; BENCHES OF THE ERASER RIVER, NEAR LILLOET, BRITISH COLUMBIA. 

and last " push " of the boundaries backward from their original limitations in 
1783. Russia ceded the territory, — being all of the North American Conti- 
tinent west of the 141st degree of west longitude, together with a narrow strip 
between the Pacific Ocean and the British dominions; also, all the islands near 
the coast, and the Aleutian Archipelago, except Copper and Behring Islands on 
the coast of Kamschatka, — to the United States Government, for $7,200,000. It 
added to our area 577,390 square miles. Its ownership had vested in Russia by 
reason of her claims to it through the right of discovery, and by the right of her 
possession of the opposite shores of Siberia and Alaska. She also laid claim 



230 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to the Northern Pacific as a sort of inland water. Of this latest addition to the 
area of the country, it may be said at this writing (1892), that it has already 
amply paid for itself, more than once, from the proceeds of its fisheries, its fur 
trade, and more recently from its development of gold-bearing quartz. The 
striking picture, " The Benches of the Fraser River," is an illustration of the 
possibilities of surface area in this region of North America, where one may 
travel for hundreds of miles, and fail to find a level spot large enough to make a 
place on which to play a game of football. 

The following is a summary of the territorial possessions of the United 
States from their existence as a nation, free and independent, at the close of the 
American Revolution : — 

Square Miles. 

United States in 1783, 827,884 

Louisiana Purchase (1S03), 1,171,931 

Florida Purchase (1829), 59,268 

Texas Annexation (1845) 37 6 ,I33 

Mexican Cession (1S4S), 545.7 S 3 

Gadsden Purchase ( 1 S53) 45.535 

Russian Purchase (1867) 577.39° 



Total 3,603,884 

Between the signing of the treaty of peace by George III and his English 
subjects and the North American colonies, by which signature their independence 
and sovereignty were acknowledged, and that year of grace in which the present 
chapter has been penned, — the American Republic has more than quadrupled its 
area. The judgment of history, calmer and nearer to truth than the utterances 
of past or contemporary authority, may pronounce a just verdict of disapproval 
upon the motives and methods which, in certain cases, made a pathway toward 
these vast augmentations, but it must always remain a source of gratification to 
an honest citizen that each square mile which has been added to our original 
boundaries has been paid for at a valuation agreed on by the buyer and the 
seller. He would be a bold prophet, indeed, who should assert that the limit of 
our national expansion has been reached. However that may be, there has 
already been opened to the American people the opportunity for such good work 
for God and man, within their own borders, as has not been placed before any 
other nation since the sun first shone upon the earth. Let the people of the 
United States rise to the level of their opportunity, and they will accomplish that 
for the benefit of mankind, which it has not yet been given to any other nation to 
perform. 




CHAPTER XII. 

THE SECOND WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, OR THE WAR 

OF 1812. 

; Y their first war with Great Britain our forefathers asserted and 
maintained their right to independent national existence; by 
their second war with Great Britain, they claimed and obtained 
equal consideration in international affairs. The War of 181? 
was not based on a single cause ; it was rather undertaken from 
mixed motives, — partly political, partly commercial, partly pa- 
triotic. It was always unpopular with a great number of the 
American people ; it was far from logical in some of its posi- 
tions ; it was perhaps precipitated by party clamor. But, despite all these facts, 
it remains true that this war established once for all the position of the United 
States as an equal power among the powers. Above all — clearing away the 
petty political and partisan aspects of the struggle — we find that in it the United 
States stood for a strong, sound, and universally beneficial principle — that of the 
rights of neutral nations in time of war. "Free ships make free goods" is a 
maxim of international law now universally recognized, but at the opening of the 
century it was a theory, supported, indeed, by good reasoning, but practically 
disregarded by the most powerful nations. It was almost solely to the stand taken 
by the United States in 1812 that the final settlement of the disputed principle 
was due. 

The cause of the War of 18 12 which appealed most strongly to the patriotic 
feelings of the common people, though, perhaps, not in itself so intrinsically im- 
portant as that just referred to, was unquestionably the impressment by Great 
Britain of sailors from American ships. No doubt great numbers of English 
sailors did desert from their naval vessels and take refuge in the easier service 
and better treatment of the American merchant ships. Great Britain was strain- 
ing every nerve to strengthen her already powerful navy, and the press-gang 
was constantly at work in English sea-ports. Once on board a British man-of- 
war, the impressed sailor was subject to overwork, bad rations, and the lash. 
That British sailors fought as gallantly as they did under this regime will always 
remain a wonder. But it is certain that they deserted in considerable numbers, 

21 1 



232 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and that they found in the rapidly-growing commercial prosperity of our carry- 
ing trade a tempting chance of employment. Now, Great Britain, with a large 
contempt for the naval weakness of the United States, assumed, rather than 
claimed, the right to stop our merchant vessels on the high seas, to examine the 
crews, and to claim as her own any British sailors among them. This was bad 
enough in itself, but the way in which the search was carried out was worse. 
Every form of insolence and overbearing was exhibited. The pretense of claim- 
ing British deserters covered what was sometimes barefaced and outrageous 
kidnaping of Americans. The British officers went so far as to lay the burden of 
proof of nationality in each case upon the sailor himself; if he were without 
papers proving his identity he was at once assumed to be a British subject. To 
such an extent was this insult to our flag carried that our Government had the 
record of about forty-five hundred cases of impressment from our ships between 
the years of 1803 and 1810; and when the War of 1812 broke out the number 
of American sailors serving against their will in British war vessels was variously 
computed to be from six to fourteen thousand. It is even recorded that in some 
cases American ships were obliged to return home in the middle of their voyages 
because their crews had been so diminished in number by the seizures made by 
British officers that they were too short-handed to proceed. In not a few cases 
these depredations led to bloodshed. The greatest outrage of all, and one which 
stirred the* blood of Americans to the lighting point, was the capture of an Ameri- 
can war vessel, the "Chesapeake," by the British man-of-war, the "Leopard." 
The latter was by far the more powerful vessel, and the "Chesapeake" was quite 
unprepared for action; nevertheless, her commander refused to accede to a 
demand that his crew be overhauled in search for British deserters. Thereupon 
the "Leopard" poured broadside after broadside into her until the flag was 
struck. Three Americans were killed and eighteen wounded; four were taken 
away as alleged deserters; of these, three were afterwards returned, while in 
one cast- the charge was satisfactorily proved and the man was hanged. The 
whole affair was without the slightest justification under the law of nations and 
was in itself ample ground for war. Great Britain, however, in a quite ungrace- 
ful and tardy way, apologized and offered reparation. This incident took place 
six years before the actual declaration of war. But the outrage rankled all tha^ 
time, and nothing did more to fan the anti- British feeling which was already so 
strong in the rank and file, especially in the I )emocratic (or, as it was often called 
then, Republican) party. It was such deeds as this that led Henry Clay to 
exclaim, "Not content with seizing upon all our property which falls within 
her rapacious grasp, the personal rights of our countrymen — rights which must 
r be sacred — are trampled on and violated by the impressment of our 
seamen. What are we to gain by war? What are we not to lose by peace? 
Commerce, character, a nation's best treasure, honor 1 " 



"PAPER BLOCKADES." 



233 



I he attack on American commerce was also a serious danger to peace. In 
the early years of the century Great Britain was at war not only with France, 
but with other European countries. Both Great Britain and France adopted in 
practice the most extreme theories of non-intercourse between neutral and 
hostile nations. It was the era of "paper blockades." In 1806 England, for 
instance, declared that eight hundred miles ol the European coast were to be 




considered blockaded, whereupon Napoleon, not to be outdone, declared the 
entiie Islands of Great Britain to be under blockade. Up to a certain point the 
interruption of the neutral trade relations between the countries of Europe was 
to the commercial advantage of America. Our carrying trade grew and pros- 
pered wonderfully. Much ol this trade consisted in taking goods from the colo- 
nies of European nations, bringing them to the United States, then trans-ship- 
ping them and conveying them to the parent nation. This was allowable under 



234 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the international law of the time, although the direct carrying of goods by the 
neutral ship from the colony to the parent nation (the latter, of course, being at 
war) was forbidden. But by her famous " Orders in Council " Great Britain ab- 
solutely forbade this system of trans-shipment as to nations with whom she was 
at war. American vessels engaged in this form of trade were seized and con- 
demned by English prize courts. Naturally, France followed Great Britain's 
example and even went further. Our merchants, who had actually been earning 
double freights under the old system, now found that their commerce was wofully 
restricted. At first it was thought that the unfair restriction might be punished 
by retaliatory measures, and a quite illogical analogy was drawn from the effect 
produced on Great Britain before the Revolution by the refusal of the colonies 
to receive goods on which a tax had been imposed. So President Jefferson's 
Administration resorted to the most unwise measure that could be thought of — 
an absolute embargo on our own ships. This measure was passed in 1807, and 
its immediate result was to reduce the exports of the country from nearly fifty 
million dollars' wqrth to nine million dollars' worth in a single year. This was 
evidently anything but profitable, and the act was changed so as to forbid only 
commercial intercourse with Great Britain and France and their colonies, with a 
proviso that the law should be abandoned as regards either of these countries 
which should repeal its objectionable decrees. The French Government moved 
in the matter first, but only conditionally. Our non-intercourse act, however, 
was after 18 10 in force only against Great Britain. That our claims of wrong 
were equally or nearly equally as great against France in this matter cannot be 
doubted. But the popular feeling was stronger against Great Britain ; a war 
with England was popular with the mass of the Democrats; and it was the 
refusal of England to finally accept our conditions which led to the declaration 
of war. By a curious chain of circumstances it happened, however, that between 
the time when Congress declared war (June 18, 181 2) and the date when the 
news of this declaration was received in England, the latter country had already- 
revoked her famous "orders in council." In point of fact, President Madison 
was very reluctant to declare war, though the Federalists always took great 
pleasure in speaking of this as " Mr. Madison's war." The Federalists through- 
out considered the war unnecessary and the result of partisan feeling and un- 
reasonable prejudice. 

It is peculiarly grateful to American pride that this war, undertaken in 
defense of our maritime interests and to uphold the honor of our flag upon 
the high seas, resulted in a series of naval victories brilliant in the extreme. It 
was not, indeed, at first thought that this would be chiefly a naval war. Presi- 
dent Madison was at one time greatly inclined to keep strictly in port our war 
vessels ; but, happily, other counsels prevailed. The disparity between the Amer- 
ican and British navies was certainly disheartening. The United States had 



OUR NAVAL GLORY IN THIS WAR. 



235 



seven or eight frigates and a few sloops, brigs, and gunboats, while the sails of 
England's navy whitened every sea, and her ships certainly outnumbered ours 
by fifty to one. On the other hand, her hands were tied to a great extent by the 
European wars of magnitude in which she was involved. She had to defend her 
commerce from formidable enemies in many seas, and could give but a small 
part of her naval strength to the new foe. That this new foe was despised by 




-OTTON STEAMER. 



the great power which claimed, not without reason, to be the mistress of the seas 
was not unnatural. But soon we find a lament raised in Parliament about the 
reverses, " which English officers and English sailors had not before been used 
to, and that from such a contemptible navy as that of America had always been 
held." The fact is that the restriction of our commerce had made it possible for 
our navy officers to take their pick of a remarkably fine body of native American 
seamen, naturally brave and intelligent, and thoroughly well trained in all sea- 



23 6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

manlike experiences. These men were in many instances filled with a spirit of 
resentment at British insolence, having either themselves been the victims of the 
aggressions which we have described, or having seen their friends compelled to 
submit to these insolent acts. The very smallness of our navy, too, was in a 
measure its strength ; the competition for active service among those bearing 
commissions was great, and there was. never any trouble in finding officers of 
proved sagacity and courage. 

At the outset, however, the policy determined on by the Administration was 
not one of naval aggression. It was decided to attack England from her 
Canadian colonies. This plan of campaign, however reasonable it might seem 
to a strategist, failed wretchedly in execution. The first year of the war, so far 
as regards the land campaigns, showed nothing but reverses and fiascoes. 
There was a long and thinly settled border country, in which our slender forces 
struggled to hold their own against the barbarous Indian onslaughts, making 
futile expeditions across the border into Canada and resisting with some success 
the similar expeditions by the Canadian troops. It was one of the complaints 
which led to the war that the Indian tribes had been incited against our settlers 
by the Canadian authorities and had been promised aid from Canada. It is 
certain that after war was declared English officers not only employed Indians as 
their allies, but in some instances, at least, paid bounties for the scalps of 
American settlers. The Indian war planned by Tecumseh had just been put 
down by General, afterward President, Harrison. No doubt Tecumseh was a 
man of more elevated ambition and more humane instincts than one often finds in 
an Indian chief. His hope to unite the tribes and to drive the whites out of his 
country has a certain nobility of purpose and breadth of view. But this scheme 
had failed, and the Indian warriors, still inflamed for war, were only too eager to 
assist the Canadian forces in a desultory but bloody border war. The strength 
of our campaign against Canada was dissipated in an attempt to hold Fort 
Wayne, Fort Harrison, and other garrisons against Indian attacks. Still more 
disappointing was the complete failure of the attempt, under the command of 
General Hull, to advance from Detroit as an outpost, into Canada. He was 
easily driven back to Detroit, and when the nation was confidently waiting to 
hear of a bold defense of that place it was startled by the news of Hull's surrender 
without firing a gun, and under circumstances which seemed to indicate either 
cowardice or treachery. Hull was, in fact, court-martialed, condemned to death, 
and only pardoned on account of his services in the war of 1776. 

The mortification that followed the land campaign of 181 2 was forgotten in 
joy at the splendid naval victories of that year. Pre-eminent among these was 
the famous sea-duel between the frigates '-Constitution" and "Guerriere." 
Every one knows of the glory of " Old Ironsides," and this, though the greatest, 
was only one of many victories by which the name of the " Constitution " 



THE "CONSTITUTION" AND THE "GUERRIERE. 



237 



became the most famed and beloved of all that have been associated with Amer- 
ican ships. She was a fine frigate, carrying forty-four guns, and though English 
journals had ridiculed her as " a bunch 
of pine boards under a bit of striped 
bunting," it was not long before they 
were busily engaged in trying to prove 
that she was too large a vessel to be prop- 
erly called a frigate, and that she greatly 
out-classed her opponent in metal and 

{ 




&!$$ 



*gr 



BURNING OF WASHINGTON. 

men. It is true that the 
" Constitution " carried six 
more guns and a few more 
men than the "Guerriere," 
but, all allowances being 
made, her victory was yet 
a naval triumph of the first 
magnitude. Captain Isaac 
Hull, who commanded her, 
had just before the engage- 
ment proved his superior 
seamanship by escaping from a whole squadron of British vessels, out-sailing 
and out-manceuvring them at every point. It was on August 19 when he 



238 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

descried the " Guerriere." Both vessels at once cleared for action and 
came together with the greatest eagerness on both sides for the engagement. 
Though the battle lasted but half an hour, it was one of the hottest in naval 
annals. At one time the " Constitution " was on fire, and both ships were soon 
seriously crippled by injury to their spars. Attempts to board each other were 
thwarted on both sides by the close fire of small arms. Here, as in later sea- 
fights of this war, the accuracy and skill of the American gunners were some- 
thing marvelous. At the end of half an hour the "Guerriere" had lost both 
mainmast and foremast and floated helplessly in the open sea. Her surrender 
was no discredit to her officers, as she was almost in a sinking condition. It was 
hopeless to attempt to tow her into port, and Captain Hull transferred his 
prisoners to his own vessel and set fire to his prize. In the fight the American 
frio-ate had only seven men killed and an equal number wounded, while the 
British vessel had as many as seventy-nine men killed or wounded. The con- 
duct of the American seamen was throughout gallant in the highest degree. 
Captain Hull put it on record that " From the smallest boy in the ship to the 
oldest seaman not a look of fear was seen. They all went into action giving 
three cheers and requesting to be laid close alongside the enemy." The effect 
of this victory in both America and England was extraordinary. English papers 
long refused to believe in the possibility of the well-proved facts, while in America 
the whole country joined in a triumphal shout of joy, and loaded well-deserved 
honors on vessel, captain, officers, and men. 

The chagrin of the English public at the unexpected result of this sea battle 
was changed to amazement when one after another there followed no less than 
six combats of the same duel-like character, in which the American vessels were 
invariably victorious. The first was between our sloop, the " Wasp," and the 
Eno-fish brig, the " Frolic," which was convoying a fleet of merchantmen. The 
fight was one of the most desperate in the war; the two ships were brought so 
close together that their gunners could touch the sides of the opposing vessels 
with their rammers. Broadside after broadside was poured into the " Frolic " by 
the "Wasp," which obtained the superior position, but her sailors, unable to 
await the victory which was sure to come from the continued raking of the 
enemy's vessel, rushed upon her decks without orders and soon overpowered 
her. Again the British loss in killed and wounded was large ; that of the Ameri- 
cans very small. It in no wise detracted from the glory of this victory that both 
victor and prize were soon captured by a British man-of-war of immensely supe- 
rior strength. Following this action, Commodore Stephen Decatur, in our frigate, 
the " United States," attacked the "Macedonian," a British vessel of the same kind, 
and easily defeated her, bringing her into New York harbor on New Year's Day, 
1 81 3, where he received an ovation equal to that offered Captain Hull. The 
same result followed the attack of the "Constitution," now under the command 



OTHER SEA-DUELS. 



239 



of Commodore Rain- 
"Java;" the latter had her 
about one hundred wound- 
that it was decided to blow 
tion " suffered so little that 
Ironsides," a name now 
been in every school-boy's 
resulted, in the great ma- 
jority of cases in the same 
way — in all unstinted 
praise was awarded by the 




bridge, upon the English 
captain and fifty men killed and 
ed, and was left such a wreck 
her up, while the " Constitu- 
she was in sport dubbed " Old 
ennobled by a poem which has 
mouth. Other naval combats 








STATUE OF COMMODORE TERRY. 

whole world, even including 
England herself, to the admira- 
ble seamanship, the wonderful 
gunnery, and the constant per- 
sonal intrepitude of our naval 
forces. When the second year 
of the war closed our little navy 



2 4 o • THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

had captured twenty-six war-ships, armed with 560 guns, while it had lost only 
seven ships, carrying 119 guns. 

But, if the highest honors of the war were thus won by our navy, the 
most serious injury materially to Great Britain was in the devastation of her 
commerce by American privateers. No less than two hundred and fifty 
of these sea guerrillas were afloat, and in the first year of the war they 
captured over three hundred merchant vessels, sometimes even attacking 
and overcoming the smaller class of war-ships. The privateers were usually 
schooners armed with a few small guns, but carrying one long cannon 
mounted on a swivel so that it could be turned to any point of the horizon, 
and familiarly known as Long Tom. Of course, the crews were influenced 
by greed as well as by patriotism. Privateering is a somewhat doubtful 
mode of warfare at the best ; but international law permits it ; and though 
it is hard to dissociate from it a certain odor, as of legalized piracy, it is 
legitimate to this day. And surely if it were ever justifiable it was at that 
time. As Jefferson said, there were then tens of thousands of seamen 
forced by war from their natural means of support and useless to their 
country in any other way, while by "licensing private armed vessels the whole 
naval force of the nation was truly brought to bear on the foe." The havoc 
wrought on British trade was widespread indeed ; altogether between fifteen 
hundred and two thousand prizes were taken by the privateers. To compute 
the value of these prizes is impossible, but some idea may be gained from 
the single fact that one privateer, the " Yankee," in a cruise of less than 
two months captured five brigs and four schooners with cargoes valued at 
over half a million dollars. The men engaged in this form of warfare were 
bold to recklessness, and their exploits have furnished many a tale to Ameri- 
can writers of romance. 

The naval combats thus far mentioned were almost always of single vessels. 
For battles of fleets we must turn from the salt water to the fresh, from the 
ocean to the great lakes. The control of the waters of Lake Erie, Lake Onta- 
rio, and Lake Champlain was obviously of vast importance, in view of the con- 
tinued land-fighting in the West and of the attempted invasion of Canada and 
the threatened counter-invasions. The British had the great advantage of being 
able to reach the lakes by the St. Lawrence, while our lake navies had to be con- 
structed after the war began. One such little navy had been built at Presque 
Isle, now Erie, on Lake Erie. It comprised two brigs of twenty guns and sev- 
eral schooners and gunboats. It must be remembered that everything but the 
lumber needed for the vessels had to be brought through the forests by land 
from the eastern seaports, and the mere problem of transportation was a serious 
one. When finished, the fleet was put in command of Oliver Hazard Perry. 
Watching his time (and, it is said, taking advantage of the carelessness of the 



PERRY'S GREAT JVCTORV. 



241 



British commander in going on shore to dinner one Sunday, when he should 
have been watching Perry's movements), the American commander drew his 
fleet over the bar which had protected it while in harbor from the onslaughts of 
the British fleet. To get the brigs over this bar was a work of time and great 
difficulty; an attack at that hour by the British would certainly have ended in 
the total destruction of the fleet. Once accomplished, Perry, in his flagship, the 
" Lawrence," headed a fleet often vessels, fifty-five guns, and four hundred men. 
Opposed to him was Captain Barclay with six ships, sixty-five guns, and also 




VIEW ON LAKE ONTARIO. 



about four hundred men. The British for several weeks avoided the conflict, 
but in the end were cornered and forced to fight. It was at the beginning of 
this battle that Perry displayed the flag bearing Lawrence's famous dying 
words, "Don't give up the ship!" No less famous is his dispatch announcing 
the result in the words, "We have met the enemy and they are ours." The 
victory was indeed a complete and decisive one ; all six of the enemy's ships 
were captured, and their loss was nearly double that of Perry's forces. The 
complete control of Lake Erie was assured ; that of Lake Ontario had already 
been gained by Commodore Chauncev. 



24-' THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Perry's memorable victory opened the way for important land operations by 
General Harrison, who now marched from Detroit with the design of invading 
( '.m.ida. He engaged with Proctor's mingled body of British troops and Indians, 
and by the Battle of the Thames drove back the British from that part of Canada 
and restored matters to the position in which they stood before Hull's deplorable 
surrender of Detroit — and, indeed, of all Michigan — to the British. In this battle 
of, the Thames the Indian chief, Tecumseh, fell, and about three hundred of the 
British and Indians were killed on the field. The hold of our enemies on the 
Indian tribes was greatly broken by this defeat. Previous to this the land cam- 
paigns had been marked by a succession of minor victories and defeats. In the 
West a force of Americans under General Winchester had been captured at the 
River Raisin ; and there took place an atrocious massacre of large numbers of 
prisoners by the Indians, who were quite beyond restraint from their white allies. 
On the other hand, the Americans had captured the city of York, now Toronto, 
though at the cost of their leader, General Pike, who, with two hundred of his 
men, was destroyed by the explosion of a magazine. Fort George had also been 
captured by the Americans and an attack on Sackett's Harbor had been gal- 
lantly repulsed. Following the battle of the Thames, extensive operations of 
an aggressive kind had been planned looking toward the capture of Montreal 
and the invasion of Canada by way of Lakes Ontario and Champlain. Un- 
happily, jealousy between the American Generals Wilkinson and Hampton 
resulted in a lack of concert in their military operations, and the expedition 
was a complete fiasco. 

One turns for consolation from the mortifying record of Wilkinson's ex- 
pedition to the story of the continuous successes which had accompanied the 
naval operations of 1813. Captain Lawrence, in the "Hornet," won a complete 
victory over the English brig " Peacock ;" our brig, the " Enterprise," captured the 
"Boxer," and other equally welcome victories were reported. One distinct 
defeat had marred the record — that of our fine brig, the "Chesapeake," com- 
manded In' Captain Lawrence, which had been captured after one of the most 
hard-fought contests of the war by the British brig, the " Shannon." Lawrence 
himself fell mortally wounded, exclaiming as he was carried away, " Tell the men 
not to give up the ship but fight her till she sinks." It was a paraphrase of this 
exclamation which Perry used as a rallying signal in the battle on Lake Erie. 
Despite his one defeat, Captain Laurence's fame as a gallant seaman and high- 
minded patriot was untarnished, ami his death was more deplored throughout 
the country than was the loss of his ship. 

In the latter part of the war England was enabled to send large reinforce- 
ments both to her army and navy engaged in the American campaigns. Events 
in Europe seemed in 1814 to insure peace for at least a time. Napoleon's power 
was broken ; the Emperor himself was exiled at Elba ; ami Great Britain at last 



LUNDY'S LANE AND PLATTSBURG. 



243 



had her hands free. But before the reinforcements reached this country, our 
army had won greater credit and had shown more military skill by far than were 
evinced in its earlier operations. Along the line of the Niagara River active 




WEATHERSFORD AND GENERAL JACKSON. 

fighting had been going on. In the battle of Chippewa, the capture of Fort Erie, 
the engagement at Lundy's Lane, and the defense of Fort Erie the troops, under 
the command of Winfield Scott and General Brown, had held their own, and more, 
against superior forces, and had won from British officers the admission that they 



244 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



fought as well under fire as regular troops. More encouraging still was the 
total defeat of the plan of invasion from Canada undertaken by the now greatly 
strengthened British forces. These numbered twelve thousand men and were 
supported by a fleet on Lake Champlain. Their operations were directed against 
Plattsburg, and in the battle on the lake, usually called by the name of that town, 
the American flotilla under the command of Commodore Macdonough completely 
routed the British fleet. As a result the English army also beat a rapid and 
undignified retreat to Canada. This was the last important engagement to take 

place in the North. 

Meanwhile expeditions of considerable size were directed by the British 
against our principal Southern cities. One of these brought General Ross with 
five thousand men, chiefly the pick of the Duke of Wellington's army, into the 
Bay of Chesapeake. Nothing was more discreditable in the military strategy of 
our Administration than the fact that at this time Washington was left unprotected, 
though in evident danger. General Ross marched straight upon the Capital, 
easily defeated at Bladensburg an inferior force of raw militia— who yet fought 
with intrepidity for the most part— seized the city, and carried out his intention of 
destroying the public buildings and a great part of the town. Most of the public 
archives had been removed. Ross' conduct in the burning of Washington was 
probably within the limits of legitimate warfare but has been condemned as semi- 
barbarous by many writers. The achievement gave great joy to the English 
papers, but was really of less importance than was supposed. Washington at 
that time was a straggling town of only eight thousand inhabitants ; its public 
buildings were not at all adequate to the demands of the future ; and an optimist 
might even consider the destruction of the old city as a public benefit, for it 
enabled Congress to adopt the plans which have since led to the making ot 
perhaps the most beautiful city of the country. 

A similar attempt upon Baltimore was less successful. The people oi that 
city made a brave defense and hastily threw up extensive fortifications. In the 
end the British fleet, after a severe bombardment of Fort McHenry, were driven 
off. The British Admiral had boasted that Fort McHenry would yield in a few 
hours ; and two days after, when its flag was still flying, Francis S. Key was in- 
spired by its sight to compose the "Star Spangled Banner." 

A still larger expedition of British troops landed on the Louisiana coast 
and marched totdie attack of New Orleans. Here General Andrew Jackson 
was in command. He had already distinguished himself in this war by putting 
down with a strong hand the hostile Creek Indians of the then Spanish territory 
of Florida, who had been incited by English envoys to warfare against our 
Southern settlers; and in April, 1S14. William Weathersford, the half-breed 
chief, had surrendered in person to Jackson (see illustration). General 
Packenham, who commanded the five thousand British soldiers sent against 



THE HARTFORD CONVENTION. 245 

New Orleans, expected as easy a victory as that of General Ross at Washington. 
But Jackson had summoned to his aid the stalwart frontiersmen of Kentucky 
and Tennessee — men used from boyhood to the rille, and who made up 
what was in effect a splendid force ot sharp-shooters. Both armies threw up 
rough fortifications ; General Jackson made great use for that purpose of cotton 
bales, Packenham employing the still less solid material of sugar barrels. 
Oddly enough, the final battle, and really the most important of the war, took 
place after the treaty of peace between the two countries had already been 
signed. The British were repulsed again and again in persistent and gallant 
attacks on our fortifications. General Packenham himself was killed, together 
with many officers and seven hundred of his men. One British officer pushed to 
the top of our earthworks and demanded their surrender, whereupon he was 
smilingly asked to look behind him, and turning saw, as he afterward said, that 
the men he supposed to be supporting him "had vanished as if the earth had 
swallowed them up." The American losses were inconsiderable. 

The treaty of peace, signed at Ghent, December 24, 18 14, has been ridiculed 
because it contained no positive agreement as to many of the questions in dis- 
pute. Not a word did it say about the impressment ot American sailors or the 
rights of neutral ships. Its chief stipulations were the mutual restoration of ter- 
ritory and the appointing of a commission to determine our northern boundary 
line. The truth is that both nations were tired of the war; the circumstances 
that had led to England's aggressions no longer existed ; both countries were 
suffering enormous commercial loss to no avail ; and, above all, the United States 
had emphatically justified by its deeds its claim to an equal place in the council 
of nations. Politically and materially, further warfare was illogical. If the two 
nations had understood each other better in the first place ; if Great Britain had 
treated our demands with courtesy and justice instead ot insolence ; it, in short, 
international comity had taken the place of international ill-temper, the war might 
have been avoided altogether. Its undoubted benefits to us were incidental 
rather than direct. But though not formally recognized by treaty, the rights oi 
American seamen and of American ships were in fact no longer intringed upon 
by Great Britain. 

One political outcome of the war must not be overlooked. The New Eng- 
land Federalists had opposed it from the beginning, had naturally fretted at their 
loss of commerce, and had bitterly upbraided the Democratic administration for 
currying popularity by a war carried on mainly at New England's expense. 
When in the latter days of the war New England ports were closed, Stonington 
bombarded, Castine in Maine seized, and serious depredations threatened every- 
where along the northeastern coast, the Federalists complained that the adminis- 
tration taxed them for the war but did not protect them. The outcome of all 
this discontent was the Hartford Convention. In point of fact it was a quite 



246 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



harmless conference which proposed some constitutional amendments, protested 
against too great centralization of power, and urged the desirability of peace with 
honor. But the most absurd rumors were prevalent about its intentions ; a regi- 
ment of troops was actually sent to Hartford to anticipate treasonable outbreaks ; 
and for many years good Democrats religiously believed that there had been a 
plot to set up a monarchy in New England with the Duke of Kent as king. 
Harmless as it was, the Hartford Convention proved the death of the Federalist 
party. Its mild debates were distorted into secret conclaves plotting treason, 
and, though the news of peace followed close upon it, the Convention was long 
an object of opprobrium and a political bugbear. 




A PLANTERS HOUSE IN GEORGIA. 



OUR INDIAN PROBLEM. 

BY HONORABLE HENRY L. DAWES, 

C7/</i; /«,;« Committee on Indian Affairs, United States Senate. 

WITH HISTORICAL SKETCH BY ANNA L. DAWES. 



CHAPTER XIII. 
The Story ok the Indian. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

The Indian ok the Nineteenth Century 
(Or Our Indian Problem). 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE STORY OP THE INDIAN. 




\ < HEYENNE. 



T the time when our forefathers first landed on these 
shores, they found the Indian here. Whether at Ply- 
mouth or Jamestown, at the mouth of the Hudson or 
in Florida, their first welcome was from the red man. 
To him the country belonged, and from him the white 
man secured it, sometimes by form of purchase, some- 
times as conqueror, more often by the simpler process 
of taking possession as a settler. For the most part 
the Indian acquiesced at first. The white man and his 
ways were new and strange and somewhat fearful to 
the child of the forest, and it seemed best to propitiate so formidable an 
antagonist. But the early settlers were men of blood ami iron, and both in 
theory and practice their tender mercies were cruel. On the part ot the 
settlers the Indian was everywhere so treated that friendship turned to 
enmity, and on both sides fear became an ally of hate. Now and then a 
leader, broader minded than his fellows, like Standish or John Smith, met 
the red man with justice, and cemented bonds that stood the strain of battle ; 
but at the beginning, as truly as to-day, the white settler coveted land and 
pushed the Indian off it that he might dwell thereon in peace. And it 
must be said that in the seventeenth century he violated no tradition, set 

247 



> 4 8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



himself against no law, human or divine, when he did this. Possession was 
still the right of the stronger, the world over, and the conquest of new 
countries the chief glory of king and commons alike. To flee away from 
oppression was the only refuge, and to oppressor as well as oppressed it 
seemed a natural resort. The country was broad enough for both, thought 
the white man. If the red man could not live with the new comers on the 
coast, let him rly to the fresh wilderness of the interior ; and so he did, year 
after year, until one day there was no more wilderness. Then the nation 

which in the nineteenth century 
still kept up the habits of the seven- 
teenth, found that the weapons of 
that old time were two-edged ; we 
could not conquer without fighting, 
nor oppress without revolt ; and we 
learned at last that a new day must 
have new deeds. 

Our early relations with the 
Indian may be roughly divided into 
different periods, covering the time 
from the first landing on our shores 
until somewhere about 1830 ; and 
then again into other periods, from 
that time until now. In the first or 
early chapter of our Indian experi- 
ences we find the period of discov- 
ery, when the savage met the new 
comer with wonder and welcome, 
and the invader plundered and 
enslaved the savage ; the colonial 
period, when the savage had grown 
wiser and more cunning and waited 
for knowledge of the settler's pur- 
pose before treating with him, some- 
times living peaceably by his side, 
or sometimes uniting in the vain effort to drive him away, but always 
baffled, defeated and conquered ; and the national period, when the Indian was 
the accepted enemy of the young nation, or temporarily its ally ; but always 
their relations were those of fighting and destruction. From the year 1830 
onward, we were dictating the terms of those relations and changing them to suit 
the mood of the hour. It is necessary, however, to first consider the early 
relations of the two peoples. 




OLD MISSION INDIAN 



PERIOD OF DISCOVERY. 249 

When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, in 1620, or Captain fohn Smith 
and his followers settled Jamestown, in 1607, they were by no means the first to 
hold relations with the red men. Mure than one hundred years had elapsed 
since Columbus, mistaking our shores for the East Indies, had named the wild 
inhabitants Indians. In that time one explorer after another had landed on our 
shores and had taken possession of one tract or another for himself or his king, 
and held it, or forgotten it, as the case might be. Put whether French or 
English, Spanish or Dutch, these men were invariably met with kindness, hos- 
pitality, friendship ; and invariably they had returned cruelty. The Indians 
lived in scattered villages in much quiet and friendliness. Game, fish, a few r 
simple vegetables, including maize and wild roots, made up their living. Hos- 
pitality to friend and stranger was a duty, and to refuse succor a crime. 
They were nowise anxious to take on the white man's ways, which seemed to 
them inferior in all that was manly. Nor was it much wonder, for the new- 
comers deceived and cheated the simple Indian, or when occasion offered — some- 
times without — burned his villages, and killed the inhabitants ; and never a ship 
sailed away from the new world without its quota of kidnapped red men, carried 
over seas for trophies and slaves. The Spanish and Portuguese in the South, 
under Cortereal and Coronado and De Soto and others, the French and 
English in the north, under Cartier and Cabot and their companions, all came 
on the same search for gold, and all treated the Indian alter the same fashion. 

When the year 1600 came in, it beheld a new era in America — the era 
of settlement — the day of homes and villages, and the new question arose 
whether the two races could live together in peace and quietness. All the 
experience of the past was against it in the long memory of the red man. 
In North Carolina. Sir Walter Raleigh's romantic experiment at colonizing 
Roanoke Island had come to nothing, and left behind it the memory of an 
unprovoked and treacherous massacre by the suspicious English. Yet 
notwithstanding this, the Indian still tried the vain experiment of kindness. 
When in 1607 a colony appeared at Jamestown, the great warrior Powhatan, 
whose realms had been invaded by the Carolina colony, " kindly entertained " 
the Englishmen, feeding them with bread and berries and fish, while his 
people danced for their entertainment. Shortly becoming convinced, how- 
ever, that the English occupation boded ill for his people, finding that "the 
rights of the Indian were little respected, and the English did not disdain to 
appropriate by conquest the soil, the cabins, and the granaries of the tribe 
of the Appomattox," Powhatan determined to protect his people, and strove in 
every way to dispossess the English. The skill and courage of the 
redoubtable Captain John Smith were too much for him, and an outward 
peace was maintained, although with some difficulty, by that warrior. At one 
time Captain Smith was himself taken prisoner and his life threatened, and 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the romantic story is told that his life was preserved by the Princess 
Pocahontas. It is more probable, however, that he owed his life to his native 
wit, although such a rescue had been the happy fate of a much earlier 
explorer years before. The beautiful Pocahontas married John Rolfe, and 
thus helped greatly to bind together the colonists and the Indians. But even 
this outward kindliness was not of long duration, for the death of Powhatan 
was shortly followed by a dreadful massacre of the whites, and for twenty 
years both races in that region rivaled each other in destruction. 

In New England the story was 
much the same. Before the Pilgrims 
reached New England the Indians 
of Maine had suffered much, and 
the name of the Englishman was 
already feared and hated. Thus it 
was that a shower of arrows was the 
first welcome Massachusetts gave 
the white man. But a few months 
later an Indian, Samoset, walked 
into Plymouth, saying, "Welcome, 
Englishmen ! " and was the first of a 
group of famous red men who be- 
came the friends of the settlers. 
Squanto, Hobamok, Massasoit, Ca- 
nonicus, Uncas, Miantonomah, are 
names well known to New England 
annals, names of great warriors most 
of them, men who kept faith with 
their allies. But as time went on, 
and the inevitable results of the new 
occupation appeared, the Indians 
grew more and more unwilling to 
give up their lands, and now and 
again made a brave stand for their own.- Then occurred awful wars, bloody and 
terrible as only savage wars could be, complicated oftentimes by the jealousies 
and hereditary enmities of the different tribes. Thus if Miantonomah and the 
Narragansetts were friendly to the settler, Uncas and his Mohicans were their 
enemies. Early in sixteen hundred, Sassacus and the proud tribe of the Pequots 
made an unavailing attempt to destroy the invader, and were utterly extermi- 
nated. It is hard to tell which were the more barbarous, the colonists or the 
Indians ; alike; they burned defenseless villages, alike they murdered women and 
children. Fifty years later one of the greatest of all the Indian warriors, King 




TOMO-CHI-CHI AND HIS NEPHEW. 
a print after the fainting by William Vereht.) 



ABUSE OF HOSPITALITY. 251 

Philip, made one more last effort for his country. For a year and a half he kept 
the English at bay, appearing and reappearing all over Massachusetts, Rhode 
Island, and Connecticut, fighting with musket and fire as well as with tomahawk 
and scalping-knife, brave beyond the telling, and as cruel. The colonists suffered 
untold horrors, and the Indian endured still more, for in the end he saw his 
power depart and his race disappear from the soil he had loved so long. 

Meanwhile in New York and west of it, the great confederated tribes of the 
Iroquois or the "Six Nations" ruled over all the surrounding country. North- 
ward to Quebec, southward to Maryland, westward to Illinois and Michigan, 
they controlled the tributary tribes, and by their political ability, their courage 




: ^jemmk 'l^^mmmi 








■'si* %S~^ 



AN OLD INDIAN FARM-HOUSE. 



and their power, they daily established themselves more and more firmly. Mo- 
hawks, Onondagas, Cayugas, Oneidas, Senecas and Tuscaroras, they founded a 
federation or league, and with an elaborate polity and much advancement in the 
arts of life, with strong towns and stockaded forts, they thought themselves 
invincible. The towns were well fortified, and their palisades proved sure de- 
fenses even against the dreaded powder and balls. For more than a hundred 
years the Iroquois fought the French in Canada, or defended themselves against 
the French invasions in New York. The fingers of a single hand will suffice 
for the victories of the white man, yet in the end the Iroquois were so weakened 
and decimated by Frontenac, that their power was broken. Partly they owed 



25: 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



this result, however, to the extraordinary diplomatic ability of the chief of the 
Hurons, their hereditary enemies, who with the skill of a Talleyrand so manipu- 
lated both French and Indians as to greatly prolong the war. 

In Pennsylvania alone was there peace. Coming over in the last half of 
the seventeenth century, William Penn brought with him Quaker principles 
and Quaker methods. For the first time in the history of our dealings with the 
aborigines we not only began with justice but maintained it. Penn bought the 
land with much merchandise, and thereafter held the red man as of one blood 
with the white man. There were neither wars nor massacres, and in the dark 




COUKTSHlr AMONC I 111. INDIANS 



story of the Indian this treaty shines with the light of righteousness. On the 
Pacific coast, too, was a brief brightness. There Sir Francis Drake landed in 
the "fair and good bay " of San Francisco, in 1579, and so won the hearts of 
the natives that they made him king, and wept sore for his departure ; but this 
was only an episode, and not the long test of daily contact which the Pennsyl- 
vania Quakers bore so serenely. Other and smaller points of light there were ; 
stars in the dark night. It was not until 1528 that any man remembered that 
these savages had souls, but thereafter there were never wanting brave and 
holy priests who dared unknown dangers and endured all things to teach here 



THE COLONIAL DAYS. 



'53 



and there a few. Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, equaled each other in 
labors and martyrdoms in Florida and New Mexico, while the story of the 
Jesuits in the North and West is the very romance of heroism. The grants 
under which the Protestant English took possession of their lands had much to 
say of the noble work of bringing civilization and Christianity to the "infidels 
and savages living in these parts," and Virginia early made some efforts to 
establish schools and induce " the children of those barbarians" to learn the 
"elements of literature " and " the Christian religion," but we hear little of 
practical results until the day when that apostle to the red men, John Eliot, first 
taught the Indians of Massachusetts and Connecticut. For thirty years he 




BURYING THE SACKED PLUME-STICKS IN THE 0( KAN — A CURIOUS RELIGIOUS CEREMONY. 



lived among them and taught them to read, to work, to pray. He gave them a 
Bible in their own tongue, and amid labors many and perils more, he and his 
faithful follower, Thomas Mayhew, gathered from among those hunted and 
fighting savages six Indian churches, whose more than a thousand " praying 
Indians " once and again stood firm against fearful odds, and became a bulwark 
of safety to their pale-faced neighbors. 

While the colonists were growing strong in the North, and circumstances 
were speedily to change the Indian problem, the red men of the South were 
beginning a career unusual in our annals, since it continues in unbroken sequence 
unto this day. The Indian has gone from New England and the middle West ; 



254 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the great league of the Iroquois survives only in the legal privileges still accorded 
the poor remnants of the Six Nations ; the warrior of the plains has hardly a 
link with Powhatan or Pontiac ; but the Cherokee and the Seminole are still 
Indian nations, and still treat with us and still keep to their proud isolation, as 
their forefathers did. Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks and Choctaws, 
in the early days they spread over the South from the hills of Carolina to the 
plains of Texas. The Spaniards found them there and so did the French. The 
Choctaws joined themselves to the French to massacre and exterminate their 
neighbors, the splendid Natchez ; the Chickasaws beat back the invading French- 
men allied with the Choctaws, and owned no masters. The Cherokees met the 
friendship of Gov. Oglethorpe in Georgia with like fidelity and friendship,but met 
treachery and blood in the Carolinas with like treachery and blood, until much 
fighting and many troops were spent in conquering them. The Creeks and 
Seminoles kept proud state along the Ohio, in Georgia and in Florida, and 
during the vicissitudes of 'their northern brethren, their lives went on more 
nearly as of old than was possible in the North. 

The wars between France and England for the possession of the New 
World in America, brought about new conditions for the Indian. It is no 
longer conflicts between separate tribes and their white neighbors we have to 
consider, but battles which were part of a larger plan and attacks inspired from 
a different motive. The chronicle becomes no longer so much the story of 
great chiefs, and struggles for tribal existence, but the Indians "were tossed 
upon the bayonets of the contending parties, courted no allies, used as scourges, 
and at all times disdained as equals." For nearly fifty years the French and 
their allies, the Algonquin tribes, made constant and bloody forays all along the 
English frontier defended by the Iroquois. Through central New York, Massa- 
chusetts, southern New Hampshire and Maine, there was no rest to the 
settler. At any moment the dreaded war-whoop might be heard, and an awful 
death awaited him, while worse captivity was the certain late of the women and 
children. The familiar story of Deerfield, Massachusetts, was a twice-told tale 
all through this wide and thickly-settled region. A remote little town, it was 
marked for attack because of its unhappy possession of a church bell intended 
for an Indian village in Canada. To rescue this bell, the ever-ready Indians 
joined the French soldiers, and amidst the snows of February, the town was 
burned to the ground, and one hundred and twelve inhabitants all killed or 
carried in cruel captivity in the eight weeks' march through the deep snows 
and bitter cold to Canada. Death brought welcome release to many of the 
party. Thus did the whole country suffer, ami thus did the red man make his 
name feared above all things else. 

The varying fortunes of France and England, constantly brought similar 
fluctuations to the peace of the New World, in the fifty years before the treaties 



FRENCH AND ENGLISH WARS. 



255 



of Utrecht and Aix la Chapelle ; but that famous peace scarcely more than 
altered the scene of the fighting on this side the water. English and French 
alike claimed the country west of the Alleghanies, and the French, with their 




THE INDIAN'S DECLARATION 01 WAR 



Indian allies, lost no time in asserting 

their claims and defending their rights. 

Then it was, that in the spring of 1754, one George Washington, the young 

adjutant general of the Virginia militia, scarcely come to his majority, won his 

spurs in the unavailing campaign against Fort Duquesne. For more than five 



256 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

years the desultory war went on. Braddock's defeat was followed by many 
another French success, with its horrid accompaniment of savage warfare. 
Under Montcalm still more of the Indians joined the French, even the Iroquois 
uniting with the other tribes against the English, and it was not until 1760, that 
Canada was finally surrendered to the British. At last the harassed colonists 
hoped for peace, and dreamed that the scalping knife was thrown away. 

Shortly enough it proved a vain dream. As the plantations and towns 
crowded the hunting grounds farther and farther back, it " threw the Indian 
who had become possessed of habits modified by contact with the whites, 
upon the tribes living in the ancient manner, and bred tribal jealousies." 
The fierce struggle between French and English for the possession of the 
Mississippi Valley, made a new opportunity, and once more a great warrior 
arose, determined to make a desperate effort to free his people from the 
white man. We have hardly given enough credit to the military capacity 
and the genius for governing, of these great chiefs. They played French 
against English, Spanish against French, tribe against tribe ; they conspired, 
manipulated men and armies, fought or covenanted, with the skill and 
msi-ht and courage of great commanders. What was known as "Pontiac's 
War" was in its inception and development a revolution worthy to rank with 
the great uprisings of the old world. The Indian is always and everywhere 
possessed of the genius of ruling. State-craft is his birthright equally with 
wood-craft. Pontiac, leader of the Ottawas, Ojibways, and Pottawatomies, 
inspired by the French to take revenge, and eager to free his people from 
the hated dominion of the English, dreamed a dream of patriotism. To 
more than usual ability in many directions, he joined the imperious will and 
high ambition which mark the conqueror. He had ever been victorious, 
and he planned on a given day to sweep away the forts and crowd the 
invader into the sea ; and not without a sense of what he was undertaking, 
he proposed to do this by bringing back the French. All along the Canadian 
frontier, and in Pennsylvania and Virginia as well, the war raged for more 
than three years, before the great chief finally surrendered the hope he so 
cherished, and in 1 766 made a reluctant treaty with the English. 

The hundred years which closed with the end of the Colonial period had 
not been altogether without effort to civilize and Christianize the red heathen. 
In Pennsylvania and Ohio the Moravians had won the hearts and lives of the 
Delawares until their towns blossomed with peace and prosperity, and the lives 
of the people gave goodly witness to the faith they professed. Beset by hostile 
Indians and worse beset by hostile whites, three times they were driven — these 
Christian Indians — from their beautiful homes into a new wilderness, and practis- 
ing to the full the doctrine of love and forgiveness, these converted savages made 
no resistance. At last they were rewarded with the crown of martyrdom, when 



RE / VL UTIONAR Y U A A' 



257 



at Gnaden Huten, without pretext, ninety unresisting and Christian Indians were 
slaughtered in cold blood by the white men, and no voice of man, woman or 
child was left to tell the tale. Such instances are in striking contrast with the just 
dealings of Penn in Pennsylvania. Among the Iroquois the Church of England, 
the Moravians again, and the Presbyterians made much progress in teaching 
the children and spreading religion throughout the tribes. Prom one of their 
schools arose Hamilton College. In New England too, John Eliot had left 
worthy successors. The names of Brainard, Jonathan Edwards, Sergeant and 




RESIDENCE IN SECOND STREET, HELoW CHESTNUT STREET. 



Wheelock are known to us still by their labors and their success in teaching the 
Indian youth ; and from both sides the water came the money to carry on their 
work. It was the last named, Rev. Eleazar Wheelock. whose determination to 
start a boarding school for his wards resulted in the establishment of I )artmouth 
College, and among his pupils was the well known Chief of the Mohawks, 
Joseph Brant, who became such a figure in the Revolutionary War. 

When the Colonies finally rebelled against the Mother Country, in 1775, 
the English had learned much from the French and Indian war as to the military 
"7 



25 8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

value of the alliance with the Indians. In one way or another they had suc- 




THE APACHE CHIEFS, GERONIMO, NATCHEZ. 



ceeded in gaining the friendship of most of the tribes. The Iroquois confedera- 
tion was their natural ally, through its able chief, Joseph Brant, whose sister had 



INDIAN STRUGGLE FOR TERRITORY. 259 

married the famous governor, Sir William Johnson ; and thus the border line was 
always open to the British. As the French had thrown the Indian upon the set- 
tlers in the past, so the English now set their savage allies upon the defenseless 
towns and unprotected forts. The tomahawk and scalping knife were again the 
recognized weapons of warfare, and throughout New York and even in Pennsyl- 
vania terror was again abroad. It was in this struggle that the famous Seneca, 
Red Jacket, fought with desperation, and opposed to the last the treaty which 
buried the hatchet, with such eloquence that twenty-five years later Lafayette still 
remembered his words. In the Northwest, the French influence happily pre- 
vailed to prevent the Indian defection to any great extent, but in Kentucky and 
West Virginia there was desperate fighting in a sort of guerrilla warfare be- 
tween the red braves and such backwoodsmen as Daniel Boone. In the South 
the warlike Creeks made haste to attack the whites, but met with short shrift. 
Meanwhile the Continental Congress had placed the affairs of the Indians in 
three departments, under direction of« some of its most famous men, and even 
employed the Indians in its armies. But only an isolated few were actively on 
the side of the Colonists. 

The close of the Revolutionary W T ar brought only a partial cessation of the 
Indian warfare. The red man was by no means disposed to give up his country 
without a struggle, and all throughout the interior, in what is now Indiana, Illinois, 
and Wisconsin, and along the Ohio River, there were constant outbreaks, and 
battles of great severity. The conflict in Indiana brought forward the services 
of a young Lieutenant, William Henry Harrison, who for many years had much 
to do with Indians, both as officer and as Governor of the new Indian Territory. 
In 181 1 appeared another of those great Indian chiefs whose abilities and influ- 
ence are well worth attention and study. Tecumseh, a mighty warrior of mixed 
Creek and Shawnee blood, once more dreamt the old dream of freeing his people. 
With eloquence and courage he urged them on, by skill he combined the tribes 
in a new alliance, and, encouraged by British influence, he looked forward to a 
great success. While he sought to draw the Southern Indians into his scheme, 
his brother rashly joined battle with General Harrison, and was utterly defeated 
in the fight which gained for Harrison the title of Old Tippecanoe. Disap- 
pointed and disheartened at this destruction of his life-work, Tecumseh threw 
all his great influence on the British side in the War of 18 12, where he dealt much 
destruction to the United States troops. At Sandusky and Detroit and Chicago, 
and at other less important forts, the Indian power was severely felt ; at Terre 
Haute the young Captain Zachary Taylor met them with such courage and read- 
iness of resources that they were finally repulsed, but rarely did a similar good 
fortune befall our troops ; and it was more than a month after Commodore Perry 
won victory for us at Lake Erie, that Tecumseh himself was killed, and the 
twenty-five hundred Indians of his force were finally scattered in the great fight 



26o 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of the Thames River, where our troops were commanded by William Henry- 
Harrison and Richard M. Johnson, afterward President and Vice-President of the 
United States For a little time the Northwest had peace. But in the South 
the warfare was not over. Tecumseh had stirred up the Creeks and Seminoles 
aaainst the whites, and throughout Alabama, Georgia, and Northern Florida the 
Creek War raged with all its horrid accompaniments until 1815 ; even the 
redoubtable Andrew Jackson could not conquer the brave Creeks until they 
were almost exterminated, and then a small remnant still remained in the 
swamps of Florida to be heard of at a later time. 

Thus ends a brief and hasty chronicle of the American Indians in the early 
days of our Nation. Thereafter they were a subject race, and a new policy was 
adopted in which we fixed the terms, and they, rebelling or accepting our de- 
cision as it might be, in the end could only submit. But as from the beginning 
so it has o-one on until now ; as we pushed the frontier farther and farther back, 
at every sta^e the Indian made one more effort for his home and his hunting 
.rounds. As in Massachusetts and Virginia, so in Dakota and New Mexico, 
Powhatan and King Philip and Sitting Bull and Geronimo have alike fought 
for their country and their people. Let us honor these patriots and not despise 
them And we may well admire them also, for braver warriors, abler states- 
men 'wiser rulers the world has seldom seen. Small was their held, cruel their 
code savacre their people, but in despair and difficulty they wrought great 
works. A pity it is that so many great names are forgotten, so many brave 
deeds unsung. ^ L _ D ^ 



CHAPTER XIV. 



THE INDIAN OK THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



Before the new Government of the United States was fully upon its feet 
it recognized the necessity and duty of caring' for its Indian population. In 
1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress 
divided the Indians into three Departments, Northern, Middle, and Southern, 
each under the care of three or more Commissioners, among whom we find 

no less personages than Oliver Wolcott, 
Philip Schuyler, Patrick Henry, and Ben- 
jamin Franklin. As early as 1832 the 
young nation found itself confronted with 
an Indian problem, and created a separate 
Bureau for the charge of the red men, 
and inaugurated a policy in its treatment 
of them. Speaking in general, we have 
altered this policy three times. As a 
matter of fact, we have certainly altered 
its details, changed its plans, and adopted 
a new point of view as changing Adminis- 
trations have changed the administrators 
of our Indian affairs. But in the large, 
there have been three great steps in our 
Indian policy, and these have to some 
extent grown out of our changing condi- 
tions. The first plan was that of the 
reservations. Under that system, as the Indian land was wanted by the white 
population he was removed across the Mississippi and still further west, pushed 
step by step beyond and beyond ; and as time went on and the population fol- 
lowed hard after, he was confined to designated tracts. It was no matter that 
these tracts were absolutely guaranteed to him, he was still driven off them again 
and again as the farmer or the miner demanded the land. In time a new policy 
was attempted, or, rather, an old policy was revived, that of concentrating the 

261 




HON. HENRY 



262 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

whole body ot Indians in one State or Territory, but the obvious impossibility 
of that scheme soon wrought its own end. Less than twenty years ago the 
present plan took its place, that of education and eventual absorption. 

In 1830 the country seemed to stretch beyond any possible need of 
the young nation, lusty as it was, and the wide wilderness of the Rocky 
Mountains to furnish hunting grounds for all time. The Mississippi Valley 
and the Northwest were still unsettled and uneasy, and in the South the 
Five Nations were greatly in the way of their white neighbors, and the 
scheme of removing the red inhabitants beyond the Mississippi was begun. 
The first removals were, like the last, times of trouble and disturbance, 
and then, as now, there were two parties in the tribes, those who saw there 
was no way but submission, and those who indulged the fruitless dream of 
revolt. Thus the Sac and Fox tribe of Wisconsin was divided, and although 
Keokuk and one band went peaceably to their new home among the Iowas, 
Black Hawk and his followers were slow to depart, and were removed by 
force. The Indian Department failed to furnish corn enough for the new 
settlement, and going to seek it among the Winnebagoes, the Indians came 
into collision with the Government. Thereafter ensued a series of misunder- 
standings, and consequent fights, and great alarm among the whites and the 
destruction of the Indians. The story is the same story, almost to details, that 
every year has seen from that day to this. 

Under President Monroe several treaties were made with the Five Nations, 
by which, one after another, they ceded their Southern lands to the Government, 
and took in exchange the country now known as the Indian Territory. They 
wrrc already far advanced in civilization, with leaders combining in blood 
and brain the Indian astuteness and the white man's experience and educa- 
tion. John Ross, a half-breed chief of the Cherokees, of extraordinary ability, 
brought about the removal under conditions more favorable than often occurred. 
He was bitterly opposed by full half the Indians, and it was not without suf- 
ferings and losses of more than one kind that the great Southern league was 
removed to the fair and fertile land they had chosen in the far-off West. It was 
owing to the sagacity of John Ross and his associates that this land was 
secured to them, as no other land has ever been secured to any Indian 
tribe. They hold it to-day by patent, as secure in the sight of the 
law as an old Dutch manor house or Virginia plantation, and all the learning 
of the highest tribunals has not yet found the way to evade or disregard 
these solemn obligations. To these men, too, and to the missionaries 
who had long taught these tribes, do they owe an elaborate and effective civili- 
zation, and a governmental polity which preserves for them alone, among all 
their red brethren, the title and the state of nations. The Seminoles, who were 
of the Creek blood, were divided, some of them going west with their brethren, 



TREATIES. 



263 



some of them, the larger part, remaining in Florida. With these, about four 
thousand in all, under Osceola, the Government fought a seven years' war, costing 
forty millions of dollars and untold lives. After like fashion have all our " re- 
movals " proceeded, and from like causes — the greed of the white man and 
the ferocity of the outraged Indian. It is useless and impossible to give the de- 
tails of all the various tribes that have been pushed about, hither and yon. In 
1830 the East was already crowding toward the West, and every decade saw 
the frontier moved onward with giant strides. Everywhere the Indian was an 
undesirable neighbor, and when, in 1849, the discovery of gold began to create a 
new nation on the Pacific slope, a pressure began from that side also, and the 
intervening deserts became a thoroughfare for the pilgrims of fortune and the 
many lovers of adventure. From year to year the United States made fresh 
treaties with the innumerable tribes ; those in 
the East were gone already, those in the interior 
were following fast, and there had arisen the 
new necessity of dealing with those in the far 
West. One tribe after another would be planted 
on a reservation millions of acres in extent and 
apparently far beyond the home of civilization, 
and almost in a twelvemonth the settler would 
be upon its border demanding its broad acres. 
The reservations were altered, reduced, taken 
away altogether, at the pleasure of the Govern- 
ment, with little regard to the rights or wishes of 
the Indian. Usually this brought about fighting, 
and it produced a state of permanent discon- 
tent that wrought harm for both settler and 
savage. The Indian grew daily more and more 
treacherous and constantly more cruel. The 
white settler was daily in greater danger, and 
constantly more full of revenge. 

A new complication entered into the problem. The game was fast dis- 
appearing, and therewith the life of the Indian. It became necessary for the 
Government to furnish rations and clothes, lest he starve and freeze. Cheating 
was the rule and deception the every-day experience of these savages. In 
1795 General Wayne gained the nickname of General To-morrow, so slow was 
the Government to fulfill his promises ; and thus for more than a hundred years 
it has always been to-morrow for the Indian. Exasperated beyond endurance, 
he was ever ready to retaliate, and the horrors of an Indian war constantlv hung 
over the pioneer. During all this period we treated these Indians as if they 
were foreign nations, and made solemn treaties with them, aLTeeim: to furnish 




PEDRI I PINO. 
GOVERNOR 



\I-I.A. FORMERLY 
THIRTY YEARS. 



264 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



them rations or marking the reservation bounds. We have made more than a 
thousand of these treaties, and General Sherman is the authority for the state- 
ment that we have broken every one ourselves. Day by day the gluttonous 
idleness, the loss of hope and future, the sense of wrong, and the bitter feeling 
of contempt united to degrade the red man as well as to madden him. The 
fighting did not cease, for all the promises or the threats of the Government. 
But always, it is credibly declared, the first cause of an Indian outbreak has 
been a wrong suffered. And always, in these latter days as in the earlier 
period, it has meant one more effort on the part of the old warriors to regain 

the power they saw slipping 
away so fast. Both these 
causes entered into the awtul 
Sioux War in Minnesota in 
1862. Suffering from piled-up 
wrongs, smarting under the 
loss of power, and conscious 
that the Civil War was their 
opportunity, a party of one 
hundred and fifty Sioux began 
the most horrid massacre of 
the last fifty years ; the begin- 
ning of a struggle which lasted 
more than a year, which was 
remarkable for the steadfast 
fidelity of the Christian Indians, 
to whose help and succor whole 
bodies of white men owed 
their lives. Four years later, 
in 1866, the discovery of gold 
in Montana caused the inva- 

KON-IT 1 , AN INDIAN CHIEF. 

sion of the Sioux reservation, 
and Red Cloud set about defending it. Scarcely more than thirty years old, 
but no mean warrior, he fought the white man long and desperately and with 
the cunning of his race. This outbreak was scarcely quieted when another 
occurred. As was its wont, the Government forgot the promises of its treaty 
of peace, and a small band of the Cheyennes retaliated with a raid upon their 
white neighbors. General Sheridan made this the occasion, he was seeking 
for a war of extermination, and in November, 1868, Lieutenant Custer fell upon 
Black Kettle's village and after a severe fight destroyed the village, killing 
more than a hundred warriors and capturing half as many women and children. 
The next year General Sheridan ordered the Sioux and Cheyennes off the 




PLAN OF CONCENTRATION. 265 

hunting grounds the treaty had reserved to them, but these were the strongest 
and bravest of the tribes and they resisted the order. A list of heroes, Crook, 
Terry, Custer, Miles, and McKenzie, led our troops, and among the chiefs whom 
they met in a long and desperate struggle were Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail, 
notable warriors both. At the battle of the Big Horn, by some misunderstanding 
or mismanagement General Custer was left with only five companies to meet 
nearly three thousand savage Sioux. He fought desperately until the last but 
he himself was killed, and so utterly was his command destroyed that not a 
single man was left alive. The attempt to remove the Modocs from California 
to Oregon in 1872 was the signal for a new war ; and a year or two afterward 
similar results followed when it was attempted to push the Nez Perces from the 
homes they had sought in Oregon to a new reservation in Idaho. This tribe 
under their famous leader, Chief Joseph, were hard to conquer. Their military 
organization, their civilized method of warfare, their courage and skill, were 
publicly complimented by General Sherman and General Howard and General 
Gibbons, who declared Chief Joseph to be one of the greatest of modern 
warriors. 

In 1877, discouraged at all our efforts to hold the Indians in check, it was 
determined by Secretary Schurz, then in charge of the Department of the 
Interior, to remove them all to the western part of the Indian Territory, 
where the Five Nations would cede the necessary land, and there create' 
an Indian State. Great trouble arose from the attempt to carry out this 
well-meant, but impossible, effort. A single story, the story of the 
Northern Cheyennes, will illustrate the wrongs the Indian suffered as well as 
those he inflicted. The Cheyennes, as has been seen, were a tribe of great 
warriors, some of them at home in the hills of the North, some in the hills of 
the South. Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Kiowas and Comanches, were banded 
together in a close and common bond, and at first the friends of the Govern- 
ment, had become frequently its enemies, by reason of broken faith, cruel 
treatment, injustice, and downright wrong. That chronicle of misery, " A 
Century of Dishonor," contains forty pages of facts taken from the Government 
records, which relate the inexcusable and indefensible treatment of this tribe by 
the Government and the vain effort for endurance of the Cheyennes, inter- 
spersed with frequent savage outbreaks when human nature could endure no 
longer. It includes the account of a massacre of helpless Indian women and 
children under a flag of truce ; a war begun over ponies stolen from the 
Indians and sold in the open market by the whites in a land where the horse 
thief counts with the murderer ; another incited by rage against a trader who 
paid one-dollar bills for ten-dollar bills ; and tells of whole tracts of land seized 
without compensation by the United States itself. The Northern Cheyennes 
had been taken by force to the Indian Territory, and in its awful heat, with 



266 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

scant and poor rations, a pestilence came on. Two thousand were sick at once, 
and many died because there was not medicine enough. At last three hundred 
braves, old men and young, with their women and children, broke away and, 
making a raid through Western Kansas, sought their Nebraska home. This 
was not a mild and peaceable tribe. It was fierce and savage beyond most, 
and they were wild with long endured injustice and frantic with a nameless 
terror. Three times they drove back the troops who were sent to face them, 
and, living by plunder, they made a red trail all through Kansas, until they were 
finally captured in Nebraska in December. They refused to go back to the 
Indian Territory, and the Department ordered them starved into submission. 
Food and fuel were taken from those imprisoned Indians. Four days they had 
neither food nor fire — and the mercury froze at Fort Robinson in that month ! 
And when at last two chiefs came out under a flag of truce, they were seized and 
imprisoned. Then pandemonium broke loose inside. The Indians broke up the 
useless stoves, and fought with the twisted iron. They brought out a few 
hidden arms, and howling like devils they rushed out into the night and the 
snow. Seven days later they were shot down like dogs. 

Experiences like this soon ended the attempt to gather together all our 
Indian wards, and we returned to the old plan of the reservations, but with little 
more certainty of peace than before. Again and again starvation was followed 
by fighting, nameless outrages upon the Indian by cruel outrages upon the 
white man. Whether Apaches under Geronimo in New Mexico, or Sioux in 
Dakota, it was the old story over again. Thus with constant danger menacing 
the white settler from the infuriated and savage Indian, and constant outrage 
upon the red man by rapacious and cruel whites, the government found a new 
policy necessary. By a strange and unusual sequence of events this policy was 
inaugurated. In 1869 a sharp difference arose between the two Houses of 
Congress over the appropriations to pay for eleven treaties then just negotiated, 
and the session closed with no appropriation for the Indian service. The neces- 
sity for some measure was extreme : the plan was devised of a bill, which was 
passed at an extra session, putting two millions of dollars in the hands of Presi- 
dent Grant, to be used as he saw fit, for the civilization and protection of the 
Indian. He immediately called to his aid a commission composed of nine phil- 
anthropic gentlemen to overlook the affairs of the Indian and advise him there- 
upon. This Commission served without salary and continues to this day its 
beneficent work. Another valuable measure resulted. At the next Congress 
a law was passed forbidding any more treaties with Indians, and thenceforth 
they became our wards, not our rivals. 

The war of 1876 had indirectly another beneficent result of most far-reach- 
ing consequences. Among the brave men who had fought the Cheyennes and 
Kiowas and Comanches, was Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was put in charge 



268 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of the prisoners sent to Fort Marion, Florida, as a punishment worse than 
death. They were the wildest and fiercest of warriors, who had fought long 
and desperately. On their long way to the East they had killed their guard, 
and repeatedly tried, one and another, to kill themselves. But Captain Pratt 
was a man of wonderful executive ability, of splendid courage and great laith in 
God and man. By firmness and patience and wondrous tact he gradually 
taught them to read and to work, and when after three years the Government 
offered to return them to their homes, twenty-three refused to go. Captain 
Pratt appealed to the Government to continue their education, and General Arm- 
strong, with his undying faith in human beings as children of one Father, and 
with his sublime enthusiasm for humanity, took most of them at Hampton Insti- 
tute, the rest being sent to the North under the care of Bishop Huntington of 
New York. In the end these men returned to their tribes Christian men, and 
with the seventy who returned directly from Florida, every one became a power 
for peace and industry in his tribe. Out of this small beginning grew the great 
policy of Indian education, and the long story of death and destruction began 
to change to the bright chronicle of peace and education. 

What, then, is the condition of the Indian to-day? In number there are 
scarcely more than two hundred and forty thousand in the whole country. Of 
these less than one-fifth depend upon the Government for support. All told, 
they are less than the inhabitants of Buffalo or Cleveland or Pittsburgh, but 
they are not dying out, the rather steadily increasing. They are divided and 
subdivided into multitudinous tribes of different characteristics and widely differ- 
ent degrees of civilization. Some are Sioux — these are brave and able and 
intelligent ; they live in wigwams or tepees, and are dangerous and often hostile. 
Some are Zunis, and live in houses and make beautiful pottery, and are mild 
and peaceable, and do not question the ways of the Great Father at Washing- 
ton. Some are roving bands of Shoshones, dirty, ignorant, and shiftless — the 
tramps of their race — who are on every man's side at once. Some are Chilcats 
or Klinkas, whose Alaskan homes offer new problems of new kinds for every 
day we know them. And some are Cherokees, living in fine houses, dressed in. 
the latest fashion, and spending their winters in Washington or Saint Louis. 
Yet these, and many more of many kinds, are all alike Indians. They have their 
own governments, their own unwritten laws, their own customs. As a race 
they are neither worthless nor degraded. The Indian is not only brave, strong, 
able by inheritance and practice to endure beyond Belief, but he is patient under 
wrong, ready and eager to learn, and willing to undergo much privation for that 
end ; usually affectionate in his family relations, grateful to a degree, pure and 
careful of the honor of his wife and daughter ; and he is also patriotic to a fault. 
He has a great genius for government, and an unusual interest in it. He is full 
of manly honor, and he is supremely religious. His history and traditions are 



PRESENT CONDITION OF THE INDIAN. 



269 



but just now discovered, to the delight and the surprise of scientific students. 
His daily life is a thing of elaborate ceremonial, and his national existence is as 
carefully regulated as our own, and by an intricate code. It is true that our 
failure to comprehend his character and our neglect to study his customs have 
bred many faults in him and have fostered much evil. Our treatment of him, 
moreover, has produced and increased a hostility which has been manifested in 
savage methods for which we have had little mercy. But we have not always 
given the same admiration to warlike virtues when our enemy was an Indian that 
we have showered without stint upon ancient Gaul or modern German. The 
popular idea of the Indian not only misconceives his character, but to a large 




UNHORSED — AN INCIDENT n? CUSTER S FIGHT. 



degree his habits also. Even the wildest tribes live for the most part in huts or 
cabins made of logs, with two windows and a door. In the middle is a fire, 
sometimes with a stovepipe and sometimes without. Here the food is cooked, 
mostly stewed, in a kettle hung gypsy-fashion, or laid on stones over the fire. 
Around this fire, each in a particular place of his own, lies or sits the whole 
family. Sometimes the cooking is done out of doors, and in summer the close 
cabin is exchanged for a tepee or tent. Here they live, night and day. At 
night a blanket is hung up, partitioning the tent for the younger women, and if 
the family is very large, there are often two tents, in the smaller of which sleep 
the young girls in charge of an old woman. These tents or cabins are clustered 



270 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



close together, and their inhabitants spend their days smoking, talking, eatino-, 
quarreling, as the case may be. Sometimes near them, sometimes miles away, 
is the agent's house and the Government buildings. These are usually a com- 
missary building where the food for the Indians is kept, a blacksmith shop, the 
store of the trader, school buildings, and perhaps a saw-mill. To this place the 
Indians come week by week for their food. The amount and nature of the 
rations called for by the different treaties vary greatly among different tribes. 
But everywhere the Indian has come into some sort of contact with the whites, 
and usually he makes some shift to adopt the white man's ways. A few are 
rich, some own houses, and almost universally, now, Government schools teach 

the children something 
of the elements of 
learning as well as the 
indispensable English. 
T h e immediate 
control of the reserva- 
tion Indian is in the 
hands of the agent, 
whose power is almost 
absolute, and, like all 
despotisms, is very 
good or intolerable, as the indi- 
vidual character of the man may 
be. The agencies are inspected 
from time to time by Inspectors, 
who report directly to the Com- 
missioner [of Indian Affairs], who in his turn is an officer of the Interior Depart- 
ment and responsible to the Secretary, who is, of course, amenable to the 
President. In each house of Congress is a committee having charge of all 
legislation relating to Indian Affairs. Besides these officials there is the Indian 
Commission already mentioned. The National Indian Rights Association and 
the Women's National Indian Association are the unofficial and voluntary 
guardians of the Indian work. It is their task to spread correct information, to 
create intelligent interest, to set in motion public and private forces which will 
bring about legislation, and by public meetings and private labors to prevent 
wrongs against the Indian, and to further good work for him of many kinds. 
While the Indian Rights Association does the most public and official work for 
the race and has large influence over legislation, the Women's Indian Associa- 
tion concerns itself more largely with various philanthropic efforts in behalf of 
the individual, and thus the two bodies supplement each other. 

Hopeless and impossible as it seemed twenty years ago to absorb the 




INDIAN AGENCY. 



NATURE OF EDUCATION AND RESULTS. 



271 



Indian, to-day we see the process more than begun and in some cases half accom- 
plished ; and in this work the Government, philanthropy, education, religion, 
have all had their share, and so closely have these walked together that neither 
can be set above or before the others. We began to 
realize, it is true, that our duty and our 
safety alike lay in educating these Indians, 
as early as 1S19, when Congress appro- 
priated $10,000 for that purpose, and 
still earlier President Washington de- 




ATTACK BY MODOC'S ON THE PEACE COMMISSIONERS, 



'<*& 



PIS 



AEKIL II, 1873. 






^ *! 



/ / 



\ 



clared to a deputation of Indians his 

belief that industrial education was their 

greatest need ; but it is only within 

fifteen years that determined efforts 

have been made or adequate provision afforded. Beginning with $10,000 in 

1 8 19, we had reached only $20,000 in 1877 ; but the appropriation for 1891 

for Indian education was $2,291,000. With this money we support thirteen 



272 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

great industrial training schools established at various convenient points, and 
five more are about to be added. In them nearly 5000 children are learning not 
only books, but all manner of industries, and are adding to civilization the train- 
ing of character. There are no less than seventy boarding schools on the vari- 
ous reservations teaching and training as many more of these children of the 
hills and plains, and half as many gather daily at the one hundred little day 
schools which dot the prairies, some of them appearing to the uninitiated to be 
miles away from any habitation. This does not include the more than thirty 
mission schools of the various Churches. But all together it is hoped that in the 
excellent Government schools now provided, in the splendid missionary semi- 
naries, and in the great centres of light hke Hampton and Carlisle and Haskell 
Institute, we shall in 1892 do something for the education of nearly or quite 
two-thirds of all the 30,000 Indian children who can be reached with schools. 

The two great training schools at the East, Hampton and Carlisle, have 
proved object lessons for the white man as well as the Indian, and the opposi- 
tion they constantly encounter from those who do not believe that the red man 
can ever receive civilization is in some sort a proof of their value. In the main, 
they and all their kind have one end — the thorough and careful training in books 
and work and home life of the Indian boy and girl, and their methods are much 
alike. Once a year the Superintendents or teachers of these schools go out 
among the Indians and bring back as many boys and girls as they can persuade 
the fathers and mothers to send. At first these children came in dirt and filth, 
and with little or no ideas of any regular or useful life, but of late many of them 
have learned some beginnings of civilization in the day schools. They are 
taught English first, and by degrees to make bread and sew and cook and wash 
and keep house if they are girls ; the trade of a printer, a blacksmith, a car- 
penter, etc., if they are boys. They study books, the boys are drilled, and from 
kind, strong men and gentle, patient women they learn to respect work and even 
to love it, to turn their hands to any needed effort, to adapt themselves to new 
situations, the meaning of civilization. 

It is charged that the Indian educated in these schools does not remain 
civilized, but shortly returns to his old habits and customs. Can an Indian boy 
or girl be so far civilized in five years, it is asked, that he will withstand all the 
forces, personal and social, striving to draw him back to the easy ways of bar- 
barism when he returns to his old associates ? A detailed examination into the 
lives of three hundred and eighteen Indian students who have gone out from 
Hampton Institute has shown that only thirty-five have in any way disappointed 
the expectations of their friends and teachers, and only twelve have failed 
altogether ; and the extraordinary test of the last Sioux war, in which only one 
of these students, and he a son-in-law of Sitting Bull, joined the hostiles, may 
well settle the question. 



LAND IN SEVERALTY LAW. 



-75 



With the passage of the Severalty Law, in 1887, a new era opened before 
the Indian. Under it, if he will, there is secured to him and each member of 
his family a homestead of eighty acres, inalienable and exempt from taxation 
for twenty-five years. With this homestead comes citizenship and all its privi- 
leges and immunities, obligations and opportunities. All these are his, also, 
without allotment of any land in severalty, whenever he will abandon his tribe 
and take upon himself the ways of the white man. Nearly twenty thousand 
have already since the passage of 
this law taken their place in the citi- 
zenship of the nation. The transi- 
tion from a state of dependent wards, 
whose dwelling place and manner of 
life, whose food and raiment and 
very being, were controlled by 
another, into the independence and 
responsibilities of United States 
citizenship, has been so sudden, and 
in some cases without due prepara- 
tion for so great a change, as to prove 
a severe test of the manhood in the 
Indian. There have been failures, 
but they have been marvelously few, 
and this way out of barbarism to 
civilization is becoming plainer and 
surer every day. 

The providing of an inalienable 
home for the Indian, and citizenship, 
with all that pertains to that royal 
title, to all who avail themselves of 
this grant, has brought along with it 
the necessity for new laws, almost 
a new code, for the government and 
protection of this race. Citizenship, 
provided in the Severalty Law, by its own force brought every one it reached at 
once into the same forum and under the same shield as every other citizen of 
the United States. It also defined and guarded the marriage relation and the 
descent of property, as well as other domestic relations, hitherto shadowy and 
but little regarded. But the reservation and wild Indian cannot appeal to this 
law for protection or assertion of his rights. It has been more difficult to bring 
him within the pale of legal enactment either for restraint or protection. Yet 
great progress has been made even here. The judicious expenditure of large 




GENERAL GEORGE CR( 



274 • THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

appropriations for the education of the Indian has done much to clear the way 
and make the bringing' of this class of Indians under the restraining and 
civilizing influence of law. It has not always been possible, among savages, to 
do this in strict conformity with the normal methods pointed out in the Consti- 
tution which governs the States and civilized people, but methods have been 
adopted suited to the conditions of the several tribes, and best adapted to the 
maintenance of peace, the protection of person and property, and the lesson 
of restraint which comes from familiarity with the administration of law in its 
various forms. This has been accomplished to a remarkable degree through 
the agency of the Indian himself. An Indian police selected from the most 
trustworthy and efficient Indians, paid and uniformed by the Government, 
patrol the reservations, preserving the peace and enforcing an observance of 
law. A "Court of Indian Offenses," presided over by three discreet and 
influential Indians appointed by and under the constant supervision of the 
Secretary of the Interior, try and punish those who are charged with the com- 
mission of minor offenses ; while in the matter of the more serious crimes of 
murder, arson, robbery, and the like, perpetrated either by or upon an Indian, 
the offender is by law to be tried and punished in all respects as if both parties 
were white men. In this way substantial security to person and property 
prevails upon the reservation. 

It has been said that religion and philanthropy and the Government have 
gone hand in hand in the work of educating the Indian to a new conception of 
manhood. Without the work done for him by the missionaries, no progress 
would have been possible. And if some of the work already described has been 
labeled philanthropic or legislative or educational, it has been as truly missionary 
work as any done on the frontier, and its motives and many times its methods 
have been the missionary zeal and the missionary teaching. Captain Pratt was 
by no means the first man who ever taught an Indian. The saintly Bishop 
Whipple had lived among the Minnesota Indians for years, and that other saint, 
Dr. Riggs, had given his life to the Dakotas long before, and a generation had 
passed since Samuel Wooster suffered in prison for teaching the Cherokees. 
The Congregationalists at Santee, at Hampton, the Episcopalian Bishop Hare's 
wonderful schools in Dakota, the Presbyterians in Nebraska and Alaska, the 
Unitarians among the Crows, the Friends with the Sacs and Foxes in the South, 
and each of these and others in many other places dotted all over the land, are 
teaching the Indians of the Great Father, of Him who is the light and life of the 
world, of the salvation and brotherhood of men ; and they are eager to hear it. 
Our duty and our interest go hand in hand and the pathway is becoming plainer 
every day. 

The irresistible growth of the nation in the increase of its population 
demanding homes, in the reaching out after every element of wealth and power 



NECESSITY AND DUTY OE ABSORPTION. 



275 



lying within its utmost confines, is absorbing, with everything else material, the 
last unoccupied acre of the heritage of the Indian. Shall it also absorb the race 
itself, and make it part of its citizenship and body politic ? Either this, or what 
is left of the Indian race, two hundred and fifty thousand, must be soon turned 
out, a homeless, penniless band of wandering, savage tramps, the terror of the 
land. There is no alternative to this outcome but absorption or extermina- 
tion. The latter being impossible, the former alone is left us. We have 
wisely accepted it, and the success 
which has thus far attended the 
undertaking to fit the race for 
absorption attests its wisdom. As 
an Indian of the old time and 
character he is fast disappearing, 
and a new strain of blood, rela- 
tively slight and not void of good 
elements, is being safely injected 
into national citizenship. If the 
work be persisted in patiently 
and kindly it will soon be ended. 
But it cannot be accomplished by 
enactment alone, nor, without that, 
by educational or missionary effort. 
All these in harmonious endeavor, 
with self-supporting citizenship as 
the end in view, bent on the lift, 
will surely and speedily raise him 
from the low condition of helpless 
and aimless and worse than useless 
barbarism, to the plane where he 
can. according to the measure of 
an ever-increasing capacity, con- 
tribute to the wealth of citizenship 
in the land. This is no small labor 

lightly turned off. It is changing into civilized life the barbarism of centuries. 
The savage must be inspired with new thoughts and aspirations, and to make 
room for these the passions and tendencies of ages and generations must be 
driven out. It is not beginning with the tabula rasa of an infant, but with life 
born and bred a savage life. The infant is to be taught to walk, not only as a 
white man walks, but to shun the slippery ways toward which all its surround- 
ings, all its blood, and all the life which it inherits are drawing it. It is a ereat 




276 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

undertaking, and will cost much in time and money ; but it is also a necessity, 
and in the end will bring full recompense. 

The Indian race is worthy of our deepest interest. Here is a people full ot 
natural pride and bound together in a national feeling much stronger than we 
ourselves know anything about, crushed down by the power of a Government 
which seems to them always their enemy but always professing to be their 
protector ; full of despair that sees no hope in the future ; perplexed with the 
present, that seems to their direct ways and simple thought to have no explana- 
tion, but is always in some manner to be full of sorrow and trouble ; without 
occupation, with no one to understand their past or care for their heroes and 
their history ; shot down like dogs for disobeying law they do not comprehend, 
and execrated for the bravery that all men elsewhere are wont to admire ; losing 
at once their children and their customs ; these uncomprehended statesmen, 
these despised knights, this people, who can find no common ground with their 
destroyers, ask of us at least to know who they are, what they want, why they 
are as they are, to see where the fault lies, to know what it means when a war 
arises ; — to put ourselves in their place, and at least to pay attention. A tragedy 
of nations is going on in our midst and we sit calmly by, never giving it even 
the idle attention of our leisure. And some of the woes of this tragedy are also 
the birth-pangs of a new nation. If the sorrows of the past and the present do 
not affect us, let us at least sympathize with the hopes of the present and the 
future. We are given the unusual privilege to see a nation born in our midst. 
Out of the darkness of the past, its ignorance, its custom-bound barbarism, its 
wild and splendid bravery of battle, a nation is coming into the light, is begin- 
ning to know knowledge, to feel the freedom of life under law, to show the less 
splendid but all-requiring bravery of the new manhood, the every-day fortitude 
of the new womanhood. 



CHAPTER XV. 




THE STORY OK THE NEGRO. 

THE history of the negro in America is, in brief, the 
record of slavery agitation, political struggle, civil 
i war, emancipation, and gradual growth into citizenship. 
When, over two hundred and seventy years ago — 
it is in doubt whether the correct date is 1619 or 
1620 — a few wretched negroes, some say fourteen 
some say twenty, were bartered for provisions by the 
crew of a Dutch man-of-war, then lying off the Virginia 
coast, it would have seemed incredible that in 1890 
the negro population of the Southern States alone 
should almost reach a total of seven million souls. The peculiarity of the 
form of slavey, begun almost by chance it seemed, in that act of barter in 
the feeble little colony of Virginia, was that it was based on the claim of 
race inferiority. African negroes had, indeed, been sold into slavery among 
many nations for perhaps three thousand years ; but in its earlier periods 
slavery was rather the outcome of war than the deliberate subject of trade, and 
white captives no less than black were ruthlessly thrown into servitude. It has 
been estimated that in historical times some forty million Africans have been 
enslaved. The discovery and colonization of America gave an immense 
stimulus to the African slave trade. The Spaniards found the Indian an intract- 
able slave, and for. the arduous labors of colonization soon began to make use 
of negro slaves, importing them in great numbers and declaring that one negro 
was worth, as a human beast of burden, four Indians. Soon the English 
adventurers took up the traffic. It is to Sir John Hawkins, the ardent dis- 
coverer, that the English-speaking peoples owe their participation in the slave 
trade. He has put it on record as the result of one of his famous voyages, that 
he found " that negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola and might 
easily be had on the coast of Guinea." For his early adventures of this kind 
he was roundly taken to task by Oueen Elizabeth. But tradition says that he 
boldly faced her with argument, and ended by convincing the Virgin Queen 
that the slave trade was not merely a lucrative but a philanthropic undertaking. 

277 



THE STORY RICA. 

Certain it is that she acquiesced in future slave trading, while her successors. 

Charles II and fames II. chartered four slave trading companies and received 

ire in their profits. It is noteworthy that both Great Britain and the United 

States recognized the horrors oi the slave tra - 'egards the seizing and 

from Africa of the unhappy negroes, long before they could 

rhemselves to deal with the problem of slavery as a domestic institution. 
Of those horrors nothing can be said in exaggeration. They exist to-day in the 
interior of Africa, in no less terrible form than a hundred years ago ; and the year 
i So i has seen the Great Powers combining in the attempt to eradicate an evil of 
enormous and growing proportions. The peculiar atrocities attending the expor- 
tation of slaves from Africa to other countries have, however, happily become a 
thins: of the past. What those atrocities were even in our day may be judged 
from one of many accounts given by a no means squeamish or over sensitive sailor. 
Admiral Hobart. He thus describes the appearance of a slaver just captured by a 
British ship : "There were four hundred and sixty Africans on board, and what 
l sight it was! The schooner had been eighty-five days at sea. They were 

of water and provisions : three distinct diseases — namely, small-pox. 
ophthalmia, and diarrhcea in its worst form — had broken out while coming 
across, among the poor, doomed wretches. On opening the hold we saw a 
o - and bodies, all crushed together. Many of the bodies to 
whom these lino s ^ed were dead or dying. In fact, when we had made 

some sort of clearance among them we found in that fearful hold eleven bodies 

among the living freight. Water ! Water ! was the cry. Many of them 
as soon as free jumped into the sea. partly from the delirious state they were 
in. partly because they had been told that if taken by the English they would 
be tortured and eaten." 

The institution of slavery, introduced as we have seen into Virginia, grew 
at first very slowly. Twenty-five years after the first slaves were landed the 
negro population of the colony was only three hundred. But the conditions of 

Iture and of climate we- - that slavery obtained a fair start.it 

spread with continually increasing rapidity. We find the Colonial Assembly 
passing one after anoth y the condition of the negro 

slave more and more clearly, and more and more pitilessly. Thus, a distinction 
- -on made between them and Indians held in servitude. It was enacted. 
" that all servants not being Christians imported into this colony by shipping 
shall be slaves for their lives : but what shall come by land shall serve, if boyes 
Lrsofao :" men or women twelve years and no long r 

before the end of : long series of laws so encompassed the 

rts and prolv i to hav 

lal or civil I became a met lattel. 

In some of the Northern colonies slavery- seemed to take root as readily 



BEGINNING OF THE SLAVE TRAFFIC. 



279 



and to flourish as rapidly as in the South. It was only after a considerable time 
that social and commercial conditions arose which led to its gradual abandon 
ment. In New York a mild type of negro slavery was introduced by the Dutch. 
The relation of master and slave seems in the 
period of the Dutch rule, to have been free from 
great severity or cruelty. After the seizure of the 
government by the English, however, the institution 
was officially recognized and even encouraged. 
The slave trade yrew in magnitude ; and here 





again we find a series of oppres- 
sive laws forbidding the meet- 
ing of negroes together, laying 
down penalties for concealing 
slaves, and the like. In the 
early years of the eighteenth 
century fears of insurrection 
became prevalent, and these 
fears culminated in 1741 in the episode of the so-called Negro Plot. Very briefly 
stated, this plot grew out Qf a succession of fires supposed to have been the work 
of negro incendiaries. The most astonishing contradictions and self-inculpations 



2 8o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

are to be found in the involved mass of testimony taken at the different trials. 
It is certain that the perjury and incoherent accusations of these trials can 
only be equaled by those of the alleged witches at Salem, or of the famous 
Popish plot of Titus Oates. The result is summed up in the bare statement 
that in three months one hundred and fifty negroes were imprisoned, of 
whom fourteen were burned at the stake, eighteen hanged, and seventy-one 
were transported. Another result was the passing of even more stringent 
legislation, curtailing the rights and defining the legal status of the slave. 
When the Revolution broke out there were not less than fifteen thousand 
slaves in New York, a number greatly in excess of that held by any other 
Northern colony. 

Massachusetts, the home in later days of so many of the most eloquent 
abolition agitators, was from the very first, until after the war with Great Britain 
was well under way, a stronghold of slavery. The records of 1633 tell of the 
fright of Indians who saw a "Blackamoor" in a tree top whom they took for 
the devil in person, but who turned out to be an escaped slave. A few years 
later the authorities of the colony officially recognized the institution. It is true 
that in 1645 tne general court of Massachusetts ordered certain kidnapped 
negroes to be returned to their native country, but this was not because they 
were slaves but because their holders had stolen them away from other masters. 
Despite specious arguments to the contrary, it is certain that, to quote Chief 
justice Parsons, "Slavery was introduced into Massachusetts soon after its first 
settlement, and was tolerated until the ratification of the present constitution in 
1780." The curious may find in ancient Boston newspapers no lack of such 
advertisements as that, in 1728, of the sale of " two very likely negro girls" 
and of " A likely negro woman of about nineteen years and a child about seven 
months of age, to be sold together or apart." A Tory writer before the out- 
break of the Revolution, sneers at the Bostonians for their talk about freedom 
when they possessed two thousand negro slaves. Even Peter Faneuil, who 
built the famous " Cradle of Liberty," was himself, at that very time, actively 
engaged in the slave trade. There is some truth in the once common taunt of 
the pro-slavery orators that the North imported slaves, the South only bought 
them. Certainly there was no more active centre of the slave trade than Bris- 
tol Bay, whence cargoes of rum and iron goods were sent to the African coast 
and exchanged for human cargoes. These slaves were, however, usually taken, 
not to Massachusetts, but to the West Indies or to Virginia. One curious out- 
come of slavery in Massachusetts was that from the gross superstition of a 
negro slave, Tituba, first sprang the hideous delusions of the Salem witchcraft 
trials. The negro, it may be here noted, played a not insignificant part in 
Massachusetts Revolutionary annals. Of negro blood was Crispus Attucks, 
one of the " martyrs " of the Boston riot ; it was a negro whose shot killed the 




F.XU IM1NC Mi. Kills IN M< \V VnKK 



282 THE STORY OE AMERICA. 

British General Pitcairn at Bunker Hill ; and it was a negro also who planned 
the attack on Percy's supply train. 

As with New York and Massachusetts, so with the other colonies. Either 
slavery was introduced by greedy speculators from abroad or it spread easily 
from adjoining colonies. In 1776 the slave population of the thirteen colonies 
was almost exactly half a million, nine-tenths of whom were to be found in the 
Southern States. In the War of the Revolution the question of arming the 
negroes raised bitter opposition. In the end a comparatively few were enrolled, 
and it is admitted that they served faithfully and with courage. Rhode Island 
even formed a regiment of blacks, and at the siege of Newport and afterwards 
at Point's Bridge, New York, this body of soldiers fought not only without reproach 
but with positive heroism. 

With the debates preceding the adoption of the present Constitution of the 
United States the political problem of slavery as a national question began. 
Under the colonial system the responsibility for the traffic might be charged, 
with some justice, to the mother country. But from the day when the Declaration 
of Independence asserted " That all men are created equal, that they are endowed 
by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness," the peoples of the new, self-governing States 
could not but have seen that with them lay the responsibility. There is ample 
evidence that the fixing of the popular mind on liberty as an ideal bore results 
immediately in arousing anti-slavery sentiment. Such sentiment existed in the 
South as well as in the North. Even North Carolina in 1 786 declared the slave 
trade of "evil consequences and highly impolitic." All the Northern States 
abolished slavery, beginning with Vermont, in 1777 and ending with New Jersey 
in 1804. It should be added, however, that many of the Northern slaves were 
not freed, but sold to the South. As we have already intimated, also, the 
agricultural and commercial conditions in the North were such as to make slave 
labor less and less profitable, while in the South the social order of things, 
agricultural conditions, and the 'climate, were gradually making it seemingly 
indispensable. 

When the Constitutional debates began the trend of opinion seemed 
strongly against slavery. Many delegates thought that the evil would die out 
of itself. One thought the abolition of slavery already rapidly going on and 
soon to be completed. Another asserted that "slavery in time will not be a 
speck in our country." Mr. Jefferson, on the other hand, in view of the retention 
of slavery, declared roundly that he trembled for his country when he remem- 
bered that God was just. And John Adams urged again and again that " every 
measure of prudence ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation 
of slavery from the United States." The obstinate States in the convention 
were South Carolina and Georgia. Their delegates declared that their States 



SLAVERY ESTABLISHED IN THE SOUTH. 283 

would absolutely refuse ratification to the Constitution unless slavery were 
recognized. The compromise sections finally agreed upon avoided the use of 
the words slave and slavery but clearly recognized the institution and even gave 
the slave States the advantage of sending representatives to Congress on a 
basis of population determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, 
"three-fifths of all other persons." The other persons thus referred to were, it 
is needless to add, negro slaves. 

The entire dealing with the question of slavery, at the framing of the Con- 
stitution, was a series of compromises. This is seen again in the postponement 
of forbidding the slave trade from abroad. Some of the Southern States had 
absolutely declined to listen to any proposition which would restrict their freedom 
of action in this matter, and they were yielded to so far that Congress was 
forbidden to make the traffic unlawful before the year 1808. As that time ap- 
proached. President Jefferson urged Congress to withdraw the country from all 
" further participation in those violations of human rights which have so long been 
continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa." Such an act was at once 
adopted, and by it heavy fines were imposed on all persons fitting out vessels 
for the slave trade and also upon all actually engaged in the trade, while vessels 
so employed became absolutely forfeited. Twelve years later another act was 
passed declaring the importation of slaves to be actual piracy. This latter law, 
however, was of little practical value, as it was not until 1861 that a conviction 
was obtained under it. Then, at last, when the whole slave question was about 
to be settled forever, a ship-master was convicted and hanged for piracy in New 
York for the crime of being engaged in the slave trade. In despite of all laws, 
however, the trade in slaves was continued secretly, and the profits were so 
enormous that the risks did not prevent continual attempts to smuggle slaves 
into the territory of the United States. 

The first quarter of a century of our history, after the adoption of the Con- 
stitution, was marked by comparative quietude in regard to the future of slavery. 
In the North, as we have seen, the institution died a natural death, but there 
was no disposition evinced in the Northern States to interfere with it in the 
South. The first great battle took place in 1820 over the so-called Missouri 
Compromise. Now, for the first time, the country was divided, sectionally and 
in a strictly political way, upon issues which involved the future policy of the 
United States as to the extension or restriction of slave territory. State after 
State had been admitted into the Union, but there had been an alternation of 
slave and free States, so that the political balance was not disturbed. Thus, 
Virginia was balanced by Kentucky, Tennessee by Ohio, Louisiana by Indiana, 
and Mississippi by Illinois. The last State admitted had been Alabama, of course 
as a slaveholding State. Now it was proposed to admit Missouri, and, to still 
maintain the equality of political power, it was contended that slavery should be 



284 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

■ prohibited within her borders. But the slave power had by this time acquired 
great strength, and was deeply impressed with the necessity of establishing itself 
in the vast territory west of the Mississippi. The Southern States would not 
tolerate for a moment the proposed prohibition of slavery in the new State of 
Missouri. On the other hand, the Middle and Eastern States were beginning 
to be aroused to the danger threatening public peace if slavery were to be 
allowed indefinite extension. They had believed that the Ordinance of 1787, 
adopted simultaneously with the Constitution, and which forbade slavery to be 
established in the territory northwest of the Ohio, had settled this question 
definitely. A fierce debate was waged through two sessions of Congress, and 
in the end it was agreed to withdraw the prohibition of slavery in Missouri, but 
absolutely prohibit it forever in all the territory lying north of 36 30' latitude. 
This was a compromise, satisfactory only because it seemed to dispose of the 
question of slavery in the territories once and forever. It was carried mainly by 
the great personal influence of Henry Clay. It did, indeed, dispose of slavery 
as a matter of national legislative discussion for thirty years. 

But this interval was distinctively the period of agitation. Anti-slavery 
sentiment of a mild type had long existed. The Quakers had, since Revolu- 
tionary times held anti-slavery doctrines, had released their own servants from 
bondage, and had disfellowshiped members who refused to concur in the sacri- 
fice. The very last public act of Benjamin Franklin was the framing of a memo- 
rial to Congress deprecating the existence of slavery in a free country. In New 
York the Manumission Society had been founded in 1785, with John Jay and 
Alexander Hamilton, in turn, as its presidents. But all the writing and speak- 
ing was directed against slavery as an institution and in a general way, and with 
no tone of aggression. Gradual emancipation or colonization were the only 
remedies suggested. It was with the founding of the "Liberator" by William 
Lloyd Garrison, in 1831, that the era of aggressive abolitionism began. Garri- 
son and his society maintained that slavery was a sin against God and man ; that 
immediate emancipation was a duty ; that slave owners had no claim to compen- 
sation ; that all laws upholding slavery were, before God, null and void. Garri- 
son exclaimed : " I am in earnest. I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I 
will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard." His paper bore conspicu- 
ously the motto " No union with slaveholders." The Abolitionists were, in 
numbers, a feeble band; as a party they never acquired strength, nor were 
their tenets adopted strictly by any political party ; but they served the purpose 
of arousing the conscience of the nation. They were abused, vilified, mobbed, 
all but killed. Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope 
around his neck — through those very streets which, in 1851, had their shops 
closed and hung in black, with flags Union down and a huge coffin suspended in 
mid-air, on the clay when the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, was marched through 



AGITATION AND AGITATORS. 



285 



them on his way back to his master, under a guard of nearly two thousand men. 
Mr. Garrison's society soon took the ground that the union of States with 
slavery retained was "an agreement with hell and a covenant with death," and 
openly advocated secession of the non-slaveholding States. On this issue the 
Abolitionists split into two branches, and those who threw off Garrison's lead 
maintained that there was power enough under the Constitution to do away with 
slavery. To the fierce invective and constant agitation of Garrison were, in 
time, added the splendid oratory of Wendell Phillips, the economic arguments 
of Horace Greeley, the wise statesmanship of Charles Sumner, the fervid writ- 




A COTTON FIELD IN GEORGIA. 



ings of Channing and Fmierson, and the noble poetry of Whittier. All these 
and others, in varied ways and from different points of view, joined in educating 
the public opinion of the North to see that the permanent existence of slavery 
was incompatible with that of a free Republic. 

In the South, meanwhile, the institution was intrenching itself more and 
more firmly. The invention of the cotton-gin and the beginning of the reign ot 
Cotton as King made the great plantation system a seeming commercial neces- 
sity. From the deprecatory and half apologetic utterances of early Southern 
statesmen we come to Mr. Calhoun's declaration that slavery "now preserver 



286 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

in quiet and security more than six and a half million human beings, and that 
it could not be destroyed without destroying the peace and prosperity of nearly 
half the States in the Union." The Abolitionists were regarded in the South 
with the bitterest hatred. Attempts were even made to compel the Northern 
States to silence the anti-slavery orators, to prohibit the circulation through the 
mail of anti-slavery speeches, and to refuse a hearing in Congress to anti-slavery 
petitions. The influence of the South was still dominant in the North. Though 
the feeling against slavery spread, there co-existed with it the belief that an 
open quarrel with the South meant commercial ruin ; and the anti-slavery senti- 
ment was also neutralized by the nobler feeling that the Union must be pre- 
served at all hazards, and that there was no constitutional mode of interfering 
with the slave system. The annexation of Texas was a distinct gain to the 
slave power, and the Mexican war was undertaken, said John Ouincy Adams, in 
order that " the slaveholding power in the Government shall be secured and 
riveted." 

The actual condition of the negro over whom such a strife was being waged 
differed materially in different parts of the South, and under masters of different 
character, in the same locality. It had its side of cruelty, oppression, and 
atrocity ; it had also its side of kindness on the part of master and of devotion 
on the part of slave. Its dark side has been made familiar to readers by such 
books as " Uncle Tom's Cabin," as Dickens' " American Notes," and as Edmund 
Kirk's "Among the Pines ;" its brighter side has been charmingly depicted in 
the stories of Thomas Nelson Page, of Joel Chandler Harris, and of Harry 
Edwards. On the great cotton plantations of Mississippi and Alabama the 
slave was often overtaxed and harshly treated ; in the domestic life of Virginia, 
on the other hand, he was as a rule most kindly used, and often a relation of 
deep affection sprang up between him and his master. Of insurrections, such 
as those not uncommon in the West Indies, only one of any extent was ever 
planned in our slave territory — that of Nat Turner, in Southampton County, 
Virginia — and that was instantly suppressed. 

With this state of public feeling North and South, it was with increased 
bitterness and increased sectionalism that the subject of slavery in new States 
was again debated in the Congress of 1850. The Liberty Party, which held 
that slavery might be abolished under the Constitution, had been merged in the 
FYee Soil Party, whose cardinal principle was, "To secure free soil to a free 
people" without interfering with slavery in existing States, but insisting on its 
exclusion from territory so far free. The proposed admission of California was 
not affected by the Missouri Compromise. Its status as a future free or slave 
State was the turning point of the famous debates in the Senate of 1S50, in 
which Webster, Calhoun, Douglas and Seward won fame — debates which have 
never been equaled in our history in eloquence and acerbity. It was in the 



THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 



>8 7 



course of these debates that Mr. Seward, while denying that the Constitution 
recognized property in man, struck out his famous dictum, "There is a higher 
law than the Constitution." The end reached was a compromise which allowed 
California to settle for itself the question of slavery, forbade the slave trade in 
the District of Columbia, but enacted a strict fugitive slave law. To the 
Abolitionists this fugitive slave law, sustained in its most extreme measures by 
the courts in the famous — or as they called it, infamous — Dred Scott case, was 
as fuel to fire. They defied it in every possible way. The Underground Rail- 
way was the outcome of this defiance. By it a chain of secret stations was 




\U.KO VILLAGE IN A LAliAMA 



established, from one to the other of which the slave was guided at night until 
at last he reached the Canada border. The most used of these routes in the 
East was from Baltimore to New York, thence north through New England ; 
that most employed in the West was from Cincinnati to Detroit. It has 
been estimated that not fewer than thirty thousand slaves were thus assisted 
to freedom. 

Soon the struggle was changed to another part of the Western territory, 
now beginning to grow so rapidly as to demand the forming of new States. 
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill introduced by Douglas was in effect the repeal of the 



238 THE STORY OF AMERICA, 

Missouri Compromise in that it left the question as to whether slavery should be 
carried into the new territories to the decision of the settlers themselves. As a 
consequence immigration was directed by both the anti-slavery and the pro- 
slavery parties to Kansas, each determined on obtaining a majority to control 
the form of the proposed State Constitution. Then began a series of acts of 
violence which almost amounted to civil war. "Bleeding Kansas" became a 
phrase in almost every one's mouth. Border ruffians swaggered at the polls 
and attempted to drive out the assisted emigrants sent to Kansas by the Abolition 
societies. The result of the election of the Legislature on its face made Kansas 
a slave State, but a great part of the people refused to accept this result ; and 
a convention was held at Topeka which resolved that Kansas should be free 
even if the laws formed by the Legislature should have to be "resisted to a 
bloody issue." 

Prominent among the armed supporters of free State ideas in Kansas was 
Captain John Brown, a man whose watchword was at all times Action. " Talk," 
he said, "is a national institution ; but it does no good for the slave." He 
believed that slavery could only be coped with by armed force. His theory was 
that the way to make free men of slaves was for the slaves themselves to resist 
any attempt to coerce them by their masters. He was undoubtedly a fanatic in 
that he did not stop to measure probabilities or to take account of the written 
law. His attempt at Harper's Ferry was without reasonable hope, and as the 
intended beginning of a great military movement was a ridiculous fiasco. But 
there was that about the man that none could call ridiculous. Rash and 
unreasoning as his action seemed, he was yet, even by his enemies, recognized 
as a man of unswerving conscience, of high ideals, of deep belief in the brother- 
hood of mankind. His offense against law and peace was cheerfully paid for 
by his death and that of others near and dear to him. Almost no one at that 
day could be found to applaud his plot, but the incident had an effect on 
the minds of the people altogether out of proportion to its intrinsic character. 
More and more as time went on he became recognized as a pro-martyr of 
a cause which could be achieved only by the most complete self-sacrifice of 
individuals. 

Events of vast importance to the future of the negro in America now 
hurried fast upon each other's footsteps — the final settlement of the Kansas 
dispute by its becoming a free State ; the forming and rapid growth of the 
Republican party ; the division of the Democratic party into Northern and 
Southern factions ; the election of Abraham Lincoln ; the secession of South 
Carolina, and. finally, the greatest civil war the world has known. Though that 
war would never have been waged were it not for the negro, and though his fate 
was inevitably involved in its result, it must be remembered that it was not 
undertaken on his account. Before the struggle began Mr. Lincoln said : " If 



WAR AND HOW IT EMANCIPATED THE SLAVE. 



>S 9 



there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at die same 
time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not 
save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, 1 do not 
agree with them. My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to 
destroy or to save slavery." And the Northern press emphasized over and over 
again the fact that this was "a white man's war." But the logic of events is 
inexorable. It seems amazing now that Union generals should have been 
puzzled as to the question whether they ought in duty to return runaway slaves 
to their masters. General Butler settled the controversy by one happy phrase 
when he called the fugitives "contraband of war." Soon it was deemed rieht 




1 Akl.V HclMK UV AKRAHAM L[Nl_ 



;LMRY\ 11.1,1,, IM'l \.S ' 



to use these contrabands, to employ the new-coined word, as the South was 
using the negroes still in bondage, to aid in the non-fighting work of the army 
— on fortification, team driving, cooking, and so on. From this it was but a 
step, though a step not taken without much perturbation, to employ them 
as soldiers. At Vicksburg, at Fort Pillow, and in many another battle, the 
negro showed beyond dispute that he could fight for his liberty. No fiercer 
or braver charge was made in the war than that upon the; parapet of 
Fort Wagner by Colonel Shaw's gallant colored regiment, the Massachusetts 
Fifty-fourth. 

In a thousand ways the negro figures in the history of the war. In its 
19 



290 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

literature he everywhere stands out picturesquely. He sought the flag with the 
greatest avidity for freedom ; flocking in crowds, old men and young, women 
and children, sometimes with quaint odds and ends of personal belongings, 
often empty-handed, always enthusiastic and hopeful, almost always densely 
ignorant of the meaning of freedom and of self-support. But while the negro 
showed this avidity for liberty, his conduct toward his old masters was often 
generous, and almost never did he seize the opportunity to inflict vengeance for 
his past wrongs. The eloquent Southern orator and writer, Henry W. Grady, 
said : " History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during 
the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through 
these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety and the 
unprotected homes rested in peace. . . A thousand torches would have 
disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted." 

It was with conditions, and only after great hesitation, that the final step of 
emancipating the slaves was taken by President Lincoln in September, 1862. 
The proclamation was distinctly a war measure, but its reception by the North 
and by the foreign powers and its immediate effect upon the contest were such 
that its expediency was at once recognized. Thereafter there was possible no 
question as to the personal freedom of the negro in the United States of 
America. With the Confederacy, slavery went down once and forever. In the 
so-called reconstruction period which followed, the negro suffered almost as 
much from the over-zeal of his political friends as from the prejudice of his old 
masters. A negro writer, who is a historian of his race, has declared that the 
Government gave the negro the statute book when he should have had the 
spelling book ; that it placed him in the legislature when he ought to have been 
in the school house, and that, so to speak, " the heels were put where the brains 
ought to have been." A quarter of a century and more has passed since that 
turbulent period began, and if the negro has become less prominent as a political 
factor, all the more for that reason has he been advancing steadily though slowly 
in the requisites of citizenship. He has learned that he must, by force of 
circumstances, turn his attention, for the time at least, rather to educational, in- 
dustrial, and material progress than to political ambition. And the record of 
his advance on these lines is promising and hopeful. In Mississippi alone, for 
instance, the negroes own one-fifth of the entire property in the State. In all, 
the negroes of the South to-day possess two hundred and fifty million dollars' 
worth of property. Everywhere throughout the South white men and negroes 
may be found working together. 

At the beginning of the war the negro population of the country was about 
four millions, to-day it is between seven and seven and a-half millions ; in 18S0, 
fifteen-sixteenths of the whole colored population belonged to the Southern 
States, and the census of 1890 shows that the proportion has not greatly changed. 



THE FREE NEGRO. 291 

This ratio in itself shows how absurdly trifling in results have been all the move- 
ments toward colonization or emigration to Northern States. The negro 
emphatically belongs to the Southern States, and in them and by them his future 
must be determined. Another point decided conclusively by the census of 1S90 
is seen in the refutation of an idea based, indeed, on the census of i88o, but 
due in its origin to the very faulty census of 1870. This idea was that the 
colored population had increased much more rapidly in proportion than the 
white population. The new census shows, on the contrary, that the whites in 
the Southern States increased during the last decade nearly twice as rapidly as 
the negroes, or, as the census bulletin puts it, in increase of population, "the 
colored race has not held its own against the white man in a region where the 
climate and conditions are, of all those which the country affords, the best suited 
to its development." 

The promise of the negro race to-day is not so much in the development 
of men of exceptional talent, such as Frederick Douglas or Senator Bruce, as 
in the general spread of intelligence and knowledge. The Southern States have 
very generally given the negro equal educational opportunities with the whites, 
while the eagerness of the race to learn is shown in the recently ascertained 
fact that while the colored population has increased only twenty-seven per cent, 
the enrollment in the colored schools has increased one hundred and thirty-seven 
per cent. Fifty industrial schools are crowded by the colored youth of the 
South. Institutions of higher education, like the Atlanta University, and 
Hampton Institute of Virginia, and Tuskegee College, are doing admirable work 
in turning out hundreds of negroes fitted to educate their own race. Within a 
year or two honors and scholarships have been taken by half a dozen colored 
young men at Harvard, at Cornell, at Phillips Academy and at other Northern 
schools and colleges of the highest rank. The fact that a young negro, Mr. 
Morgan, was in 1890 elected by his classmates at Harvard as the class orator 
has a special significance. Yet there is greater significance, as a negro news- 
paper man writes, in the fact that the equatorial telescope now used by the 
Lawrence University of Wisconsin was made entirely by colored pupils in the 
School of Mechanical Arts of Nashville, Tenn. In other words, the Afro- 
American is finding his place as an intelligent worker, a property owner, and 
an independent citizen, rather than as an agitator, a politician or a race advocate. 
In religion, superstition and effusive sentiment are giving way to stricter morality. 
In educational matters, ambition for the high-sounding and the abstract is giving 
place to practical and industrial acquirements. It will be many years before 
the character of the negro, for centuries dwarfed and distorted by oppression 
and ignorance, reaches its normal growth, but that the race is now at last upon 
the right path and is being guided by the true principles cannot be doubted. 



2CJ2 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Says one who has made an exceedingly thorough personal study of the subject 
in all the Southern States : "The evolution in the condition has kept pace with 
that of any other races, and I think has been even a little better. The same 
forces of evolution that have brought him to where he is now will bring him 
further. ' One thing' is indisputable : the negro knows his destiny is in his own 
hands. He finds that his salvation is not through politics, but through indus- 
trial methods. 




STATUE UK WASHINGTON IN Till'. <;KOlNDS OF THE STATE HOUSE, RICHMOND. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE STORY OK THE CIVIL WAR. 




IT would be a mistake to suppose 
that secession sentiments originated 
and were exclusively maintained in 
the Southern States. Ideas of State 
sovereignty and of the consequent 
right of a State to withdraw from the 
Union, or at least to resist the acts 
and laws of Congress on adequate 
occasion, were held by many states- 
men in the North as well as in the 
South. Thus the "Essex Junto," 
which had openly advocated a dis- 
solution of the Union and the for- 
mation of an Eastern Confederacy, 
were foremost in assembling a con- 
vention of the Federalists on De- 
cember 15, 1 8 14, at Hartford, Con- 
necticut, at which resolutions were passed recommending the State Legislatures 
to resist Congress in conscripting soldiers for carrying on the war then being 
waged against England. Threats of disunion were again heard in 1 821, but 
this time from the South, in case Missouri should be denied admission to the 
Union on account of her unwillingness to surrender the institution of slavery. 
Once more, in 1832, a South Carolina convention proceeded to declare the 
tariff of the United States null and void within her own borders ; but, owing to 
the decisive action of President Jackson, the State authorities did not venture 
into an actual collision with Congress. 

But the agitation in favor of disunion reached culmination under the 
aggressive efforts by the South to extend slavery into new Territories, and 
the determination by the North to confine it strictly within the States where it 
already existed. With the formation of anti-slavery societies in the North, the 

293 



SKIRMISHER. 



294 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

nomination of anti-slavery candidates for the Presidency from 1840 onward, the 
passage of the "Wilmot Proviso" in 1846, the repeal of the Missouri compromise 
in 1854, the Dred-Scott decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857, the 
adoption of the Lecompton Constitution in Kansas in 1859, and the raid by John 
Brown at Harper's Ferry in 1859, it became painfully evident that Mr. Seward's 
prediction of an "irrepressible conflict" between the North and South on the 
subject of slavery was becoming, had already become, a reality. 

As to John Brown's raid we have only to recount that on the 16th of Octo- 
ber, 1859, he took an armed force to Harper's Ferry, capturing the arsenal and 
armory and killing the men on guard. He was then endeavoring to secure 
arms for operating against the South. He was, however, captured and executed 
December 2, 1859. The expedition, it is unnecessary to say, was foolhardy 
and wholly without justification, and Brown paid for his misguided zeal with 
his life. But it must be said of him that he was conscientious, and that by 
his reckless daring he helped to crystallize sentiment on both sides of the 
slavery question. 

The election in i860 of Abraham Lincoln as President, on the platform of 
resistance to all further extension of slavery, was the signal for the previous 
disunion oratory and menaces to crystallize themselves into action. Seven 
States, in the following order, viz. : South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, 
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, seceded, and by a Congress held at 
Montgomery, Ala., February 4, 1S61, formed a Confederacy with Jefferson Davis, 
of Mississippi, as President, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, as Vice- 
President. 

The reasons avowed for this perilous course were, "the refusal of fifteen 
of the States for years past to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and the 
election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose 
opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." 

After Mr. Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, the Confederacy was 
increased by the addition of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee ; 
Kentucky and Missouri, being divided in opinion, had representatives and armies 
in both sections. 

The eleven " Confederate States of America " took from the Lmion nearly 
one-half of its inhabited area, and a population of between five and six millions 
of whites and about four millions of slaves. Their entire force capable of 
active service numbered 600,000 men. The twenty-four States remaining loyal 
to the Union had a population of 20,000,000, and the army at the close of the 
war numbered 1,050,000 ; but as the majority of these were scattered on guard 
duty over a vast region, only 262,000 were in fighting activity. Whilst the North 
was more rich and powerful, it was, nevertheless, more inclined to peace. The 
South was of a military spirit, accustomed to weapons, and altogether eager for 



296 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the fray. The soldiers of both sides were 
equally brave, resolute, heroic, and devoted 
to what they respectively deemed a patriotic 
cause. 

The Confederates had the advantage in 
the outset, because Mr. Floyd, the Secretary 
of War under President Buchanan, 
had dispersed the regular army, com- 
prising 16,402 officers and men, to 
distant parts of the country where 
they were not available, and had sent 
off the vessels of the navy to foreign 
stations. 

Many of the old army offi- 
cers had passed over to the 
ate service, and vast quantities 
pons and ammunition had been 
ed from Northern to 
arsenals now in pos- 
the seceded States, 
the army at Indian- 
been surrendered on 









1 







''iYpi'f! 

vASk 

iMtl 

/':/? ft 

W /■ I 

M 



/. M 



itj 



ff 



WWmWM 



l»P 







THE ARTS OF PEACE AM) THE ART OF WAR. 



Confeder- 
of wea- 
transferr- 
Southern 
session of 
A part of 
ola had 
February 18, 1861, 
by General Twiggs, 
- to the Confederates, 
and other soldiers 
I' guarding our Mexi- 
) can and Indian fron- 
jj 1 tiers were captured, 
besides several na- 
tional vessels and fortresses. 
The South was, in short, 
much better prepared for the 
great conflict, and during the 
first year the preponderance 
of success was in its favor. 

The Confederates 
opened the war on April 1 2, 
1 86 1, by bombarding Fort 
Sumter, which had been 
occupied by Major Robert 
Anderson and a company 
of eighty men. This fort, 



McCLELLAN. 297 

although fiercely pounded by cannon balls and shells and set on fire several 
times, was gallantly held for two days, when it was obliged to surrender ; 
but its brave defenders were allowed to march out saluting the old flag, 
and to depart for the North without being regarded as prisoners of war. 
The attack on Sumter created the wildest excitement throughout the entire 
land, and it opened the eyes of the North to the amazing fact of a civil war. 
A wave of patriotism, as mighty as it was sudden, swept over the United 
States. President Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers for three months, 
and soon after another call for 64,000 men for the army and 18,000 for 
the navy, to serve during the war. The need for these calls was urgent 
enough. On April 20th the Confederates easily captured the great Norfolk 
Navy Yard, with three or four national vessels, including the frigate " Merri- 
mac," which subsequently wrought such fearful havoc at Hampton Roads, 
2000 cannon, besides small arms, munitions, and stores of immense value, all 
of which were given up without a shot in defense. The arsenal at Harper's 
Ferry, with millions of dollars' worth of arms and ammunition, was also in their 
possession ; and before the end of April 35,000 of their soldiers were already 
in the field, whilst 10,000 of these were rapidly marching northward. General 
R. E. Lee had been appointed Commander-in-chief of the army and naVy of 
Virginia, and the 6th Regiment of Massachusetts militia had been savagely 
mobbed in the streets of Baltimore whilst going to the protection of Washington. 

A Unionist attack on the Confederates at Big Bethel, Va., was repulsed, 
but the Confederates were driven out of Western Virginia by General G. B. 
McClellan. Then came, on July 21, the engagement at Bull Run, known also as 
that of Manassas Junction, one of the most significant battles of the war. 
General Irwin McDowell, acting under instructions of General Scott, marched 
against the Confederate army under General Beauregard, and in the outset met 
with encouraging success ; but just as the Unionists imagined the victory theirs 
they were vigorously pressed by reinforcements that had come hurriedly up 
from Winchester under the leadership of General Johnston ; and being ex- 
hausted from twelve hours of marching and fighting under a sultry sun, they 
began a retreat which was soon turned into a panic, attended with wild disorder 
and demoralization. Had the Confederates, among whom at the close of the 
day was President Davis himself, only known the extent of their triumph, they 
might have followed it and possibly have seized Washington. About 30,000 
men fought on each side. The Confederate loss was 378 killed, 1489 wounded, 
and 30 missing. The Unionists lost 481 killed, 1011 wounded, and 1460 
missing, with 20 cannon and large quantities of small arms. 

From this moment it was understood that the struggle would be terrible, 
and that it might be long, not to say doubtful. Congress, then in extra session, 
authorized the enlistment of 500,000 men and the raising of $500,000,000. 



298 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Many of the States displayed intense patriotism, New York and Pennsylvania, 
for example, appropriating each $3,000,000, whilst Massachusetts and other New 
England States sent regiments fully equipped into the field. General McClellan 
was summoned to reorganize and discipline the multitudes of raw recruits that 
were thrown suddenly on his hands. His ability and thoroughness were of 
immense value in preparing them for their subsequent effective service, and he 
was soon after made Commander-in-chief in place of General Scott, retired. 
The South was also laboring with tremendous zeal and energy in the endeavor 
to enlist 400,000 men. 




FORT MOULTRIE, CHARLESTON, WITH FORT SUMTF.R IN THE DISTANCE. 

Early in August the death of General Nathaniel Lyon whilst attacking the 
Confederate General Ben. McCulloch at Wilson's Creek, and the retreat of his 
army, threw all Southern Missouri into the hands of the enemy. A few days 
after, General Butler took Forts Hatteras and Clark, with 700 prisoners, 1000 
muskets, and other stores. But victories alternated, for now General Sterling 
Price surrounded and captured the Unionist Colonel Mulligan and his Irish 
brigade of 2780, at Lexington, Mo. Worse, however, than this was the near 
annihilation, October 21st, of a Unionist force of 1700 under General C. P. Stone 
and Colonel E. U. Baker at Ball's Bluff. The noble Baker and ^00 of the men 



1 7CT0R ] ' AND DEFEA T. 



-99 



were slain and over 500 taken prisoners. Ten days later Commodore F. S. 
Dupont, aided by General \V. T. Sherman with 10,000 men, reduced the 
Confederate forts on Hilton Head and Phillips' Island and seized the adjacent 
Sea Islands. General Fremont, unable to find and engage the Confederate 
General Price in the West, was relieved of his command of 30,000 men ; but 
General U. S. Grant, by capturing the Confederate camp at Belmont, Mo., 
checked the advance of General Jeff. Thompson. On the next day, November 
8th, occurred a memorable event which imperiled the peaceful relations between 




BATTLE OF PITTSBURG LANDING. 



the United States and Great Britain. Captain Wilkes of the United States 
frigate, "San Jacinto," compelled the British mail steamer, "Trent," to give up two 
of her passengers, the Confederate Commissioners, Mason and Slidell, who were 
on their way respectively to England and France in the interest of the South. 
A foreign war might have resulted had not Mr. William H. Seward, the astute 
Secretary of State, promptly disavowed the act and returned the Commissioners 
to English keeping. General E. O. C. Ord, commanding the Third Pennsylvania 
Brigade, gained a victory on December 20th at Dranesville over the Confederate 



300 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

brigade of General J. E. B. Stuart, who lost 230 soldiers, and during the same 
month General Pope reported the capture of 2500 prisoners in Central Missouri, 
with the loss of only 100 men ; but 1000 of these were taken by Colonel Jeff. C. 
Davis by surprising the Confederate camp at Milford. 

The year 1862 was marked by a series of bloody encounters. It opened 
with a Union army of 450,000 against a Confederate army of 350,000. The 
fighting began at Mill Spring, in Southern Kentucky, on January 19th, with an 
assault by the Confederates led by General F. K. Zollicofter, acting under 
General G. B. Crittenden. They were routed by General George H. Thomas, 
Zollicoffer being killed and Crittenden flying across the Cumberland River, 
leaving ten guns and 1500 horses. This victory stirred the heart of the nation, 
and brought at once into brilliant prominence the great soldier and noble 
character whose greatnes blazed out like a sun at the close of the war. 

Another blow was soon struck. Brigadier General Grant, with 15,000 
troops, supported by Commodore A. H. Foote with seven gunboats, reduced Fort 
Henry on the Tennessee River and took its commander, General L. Tilghman, 
prisoner, but could not prevent the greater portion of the garrison from 
escaping to Fort Donelson, twelve miles to the east. This stronghold, com- 
manding the navigation of the Cumberland River and containing 15,000 
defenders under General J. B. Floyd, was regarded as impregnable. It fell, 
however, on February 16th, under a combined attack of Grant and Foote, 
surrendering 12,000 men and 40 cannon. Generals Floyd and Buckner, with a 
few of their command, managed to escape across the river by night, and General 
N. B. Forrest, with 800 cavalry, also got away. This splendid achievement 
threw Nashville and all Northern Tennessee into possession of the Unionists, 
and caused the immediate evacuation of the Confederate camp at Bowling 
Green, Kentucky. 

In the East, about the# same time, General Burnside and Commodore 
Goldsborough, with 1 1,500 men on 31 steamboats, captured, with a loss of 300, 
Roanoke Island, N. C, and 2500 Confederates. On March 14th they carried 
New Bern by assault, losing 600 but taking 2 steamboats, 69 cannon, and 500 
prisoners ; and next they seized Fort Macon, with its garrison of 500 and stores. 
But the Unionist Generals Reno and Foster were repulsed, respectively, at 
South Mills and Goldsborough. One of the most notable of naval engagements 
took place on March 8th and 9th, when the Confederate ironclad, " Virginia," 
known better by her original name, the " Merrimac," steamed out from Norfolk 
attended by two gunboats. She plunged her iron ram into the Union frigate, 
"Cumberland," causing her to sink and to carry down part of her crew; she 
blew up the " Congress," another Union frigate, destroying more than half of her 
crew of 434, drove the frigate " Lawrence " under the guns of Fortress Monroe, 
and bombarded until dusk with terrific energy, aided also by her gunboats, the 



MONITOR AND MERR/MAC. 



301 



Union steam frigate " Minnesota," which had got aground. She seemed 
destined on the next day to work immeasurable and unimpeded havoc. But, 
providentially, during the night the Union "Monitor," looking like "a cheese 
box on a raft," which had been built by Captain Ericsson and was commanded 
with consummate skill by Lieutenant J. L. Worden, steamed into the roadstead 
on her trial trip from New York. When, therefore, the " Merrimac " approached 
for new conquests the following morning her surprise was tremendous upon 
meeting: such a strange craft. An unwonted and dramatic naval duel now 




\ \ I III \\l I :R [ 1 11 , 1 .. 



occurred, from which the Confederate ram retired badly crippled and was soon 
afterward blown up to prevent her being captured. The "Monitor" was, 
unfortunately, lost some months afterward, in a storm off Hatteras. 

The smoke had not vanished from Hampton Roads before news came of 
an assault at Pea Ridge by from 16,000 to 18,000 Confederates, including 5000 
Indians, under General E. Van Dorn, on 10,500 Unionists under General S. R. 
Curtis, supported by Generals Asboth and Sigel. After three days of severe 
fighting, in which 1351 Unionists fell, the Confederates fled with precipitation, 



3 02 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

leaving Generals B. McCulloch and Mcintosh dead and having Generals Price 
and Slack among their wounded. 

General McClellan having raised his 200.000 or more men to a high degree 
of efficiency, transferred considerably more than half of them to Fortress Monroe 
for the purpose of advancing on Richmond by way of the peninsula between the 
York and James Rivers. He left General Banks with 7000 soldiers to guard 
the Virginia Valley. This force, at that time under the command of General James 
Shields, because Banks had gone temporarily to Washington, was fiercely assailed 
at Kernstown by "Stonewall" Jackson at the head of 4000 men. Jackson 
was repulsed with a loss of 1000, whilst Shields lost 600. McClellan's advance 
was checked for a month by Confederate batteries at Warwick Creek and again 
at Williamsburg by General Magruder's works. Here General Hooker's division 
fought well for nine hours with heavy losses. Magruder, flanked by Hancock, 
whose two brigades fought bravely, was obliged to retreat, leaving 700 of his 
wounded. The Unionists lost altogether 2228, whilst the Confederates lost not 
quite so many. 

In the meantime, on April 6th, General Grant, with an army of 40,000, was 
surprised at Pittsburg Landing by 50,000 Confederates under General A. S. 
Johnson. General Grant, instead of being with his troops, was on a boat near 
Savannah, seven miles below. The Union forces were completely surprised. 
No intrenchments or earthworks of any kind had been erected — there were no 
abattis. The Union forces, surprised, were rapidly driven back with heavy loss in 
guns, killed, wounded, and prisoners, from Shiloh Church to the bluffs of the 
Tennessee, under which thousands of demoralized men took refuge. General 
Albert S. Johnson had been killed in the midst of the battle and General 
Beauregard succeeded to the command. Had General Johnson been alive the 
result might have been different ; but Beauregard was in command, and he 
missed the one opportunity of his life in resting on his arms when he should 
have pressed the enemy to the river and forced a surrender. But relief was at 
hand, and under a leader who was a master general on the field. Sunday 
night General Don Carlos Buell arrived on the scene with a part of the Army 
of the Ohio. Moving General Nelson's division across the Tennessee in boats, 
he had them in position by seven o'clock in the evening, ready for the onset 
in the morning. Two more divisions were crossed early in the morning. At 
seven o'clock the attack was begun, General Buell leading his troops in 
person and General Grant advancing with his troops, yesterday overwhelmed 
by defeat, to-day hopeful and confident. The result is well known. Buell's 
fresh troops, handled in a masterly manner, were irresistible. By four o'clock 
the enemy lost all they had gained and were in full retreat, and the day 
was won, General Buell receiving unstinted praise for his victory. The 
Union loss was 1735 killed, 7S82 wounded, and 3956 missing; total, 13,573. 




BATTLE OF CHANCELLORSV.LLE. JACKSON'S ATTACK ON TH1 RICH! WING 



304 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The Confederates' loss was 1728 killed, 8012 wounded, 957 missing; total. 
10,699. 

About the same date General Pope and Commodore Foote captured Island 
No. 10, with 6700 Confederates under Brigadier General Makall ; and soon after 
Memphis surrendered to the Unionists, and on April nth Fort Pulaski fell 
before a bombardment by General O. A. Gilmore. This same month was notable 
for naval victories. Admiral Farragut with a fleet of forty-seven armed vessels 
and 310 guns stormed the Confederate Forts St. Philip and Jackson, destroyed 
various fire-rafts and gunboats, and after a series of brilliant actions compelled 
the Confederate General Lovell with 3000 defenders to withdraw from New 
Orleans, leaving it to be occupied by 15,000 Unionists under General Butler. 
In the words of another, this "was a contest between iron hearts in wooden 
vessels, arid iron clads with iron beaks, and the iron hearts prevailed." 

McClellan's army — a part of which had been thrown across the Chicka- 
hominy — was savagely attacked on May 28th, at Fair Oaks, by General Joseph 
E. Johnston, now Commander-in-chief of the Confederate forces. Although 
Johnston was badly wounded and his troops after a day of hard fighting were 
obliged to retire, yet the Union loss was 5739, including five colonels killed and 
seven generals wounded. McClellan was now reinforced until he had altogether 
156,828 men, of whom 1 15,162 were in good condition for effective service. Noth- 
ing, however, was accomplished until General Lee, who had succeeded the dis- 
abled Johnston, forced the fighting on June 26th that led to six horrible battles on 
as many successive days, known as those of Oak Grove, Mechanicsville, Gaines's 
Mills, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, and Malvern Hill. In the last one 
the Confederates were signally defeated by McClellan with a loss of 10,000, 
while the Union loss was about 5000. During those six battles the Union loss 
was 1582 killed, 7709 wounded, and 5958 missing, making a total of 15,249. 
The Confederate loss was perhaps double ; General Griffith and three colonels 
killed. Nevertheless, McClellan's campaign was unsuccessful ; Richmond was 
not taken ; and by order of the President he retreated to the Potomac. 

General Halleck now became Commander-in-chief, and a vigorous campaign 
was opened by the Unionist General Pope. He was met in several stubbornly 
fought actions by the Confederates under Generals Lee, Jackson, and Long- 
street, and was badly routed. * In this bloody affair, known as the second battle 
of Bull Run, the Unionists lost 25,000, including 9000 prisoners ; the Con- 

* In accounting for his defeat General Pope attempted to fix the blame upon General Fitz John 
Porter, a very able and successful commander, charging that he failed to support him, and a court- 
martial convened in the heat of the discussion cashiered the General. But later, in deference to public 
opinion, the case was reopened, the previous unjust verdict was set aside, and General Porter's good 
name was cleared, his conduct being fully justified — an acquittal in entire accord with the riper 
second thought of public opinion. 



LEE. 



305 



federates lost 15,000. General Lee, on September 8th, invaded Maryland, 
where at South Mountain he was worsted by McClellan, who lost heavily of his 
own men, but took 1 500 prisoners. 

A few days later Harper's Ferry, with 11,583 Unionists, 73 guns, and 
immense quantities of war munitions, was surrendered to Stonewall Jackson. 
McClellan, with 
80,000 men at- 
tacked Lee, posted 
with 70,000 on a 
ridge facing Antie- 
tam Creek. This 
determined battle 
ended in Lee's de- 
feat and retreat. 
McClellan lost 
2010 men killed, 
94 1 6 wounded, and 
1043 missing ; a 
total of 12,469. Lee 
lost 1842 killed, 
9399 wounded, and 
2292 missing ; to- 
tal I3.533- This 
is regarded as the 
bloodiest day in the 
history of America. 
There is little 
doubt that had Mc- 
Clellan followed 
up his magnificent 
victory he could 
have entered Rich- 
mond. Here was 
his mistake ; but 
this did not justify 
the Government in 

retiring him as it did. Surely McClellan's great victory entitled him to the 
further command ; but the opposition, especially that of Secretary Stanton, was 
too powerful, and he was retired. 

General P.urnside, having succeeded McClellan, assailed Lee at Fredericks- 
burg, December 13th, but was disastrously beaten. His loss was r 152 killed, 




GENERAL RollERT H)MI'M> I.l'E 



306 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

9101 wounded, 3234 missing; total, 13,771. The Confederate loss was about 
5000. General Burnside was relieved in favor of General Hooker in January, 
1863, who — having received reinforcements until his army amounted to 100,000 
infantry, 13,000 cavalry, and 10,000 artillery — assumed the offensive against Lee 
on May 2d, 1S63, at Chancellorsville, but was terribly defeated. He lost 17,197 
men. His defeat was due to a brilliant rear and flank movement executed by 
Stonewall Jackson, who thus demolished the Eleventh Corps but was himself 
slain, [ackson's death might well be regarded as an irreparable disaster to the 
Confederate cause. 

Lee, with nearly 100,000 men, again marched northward, taking 4000 
prisoners at Winchester. He was overtaken, July 1st, by the Union army, 
numbering 100,000, now under the command of General George G. Meade, at 
Gettysburg ; where a gallant and bloody battle was fought, lasting three days 
and ending in a great victory for the Unionists. One of the features of the 
battle was a gallant charge of Pickett's Confederate Brigade, when they faced a 
battery of 100 guns and were nearly annihilated. But it was all American 
bravery. They lost 2S34 killed, 13,709 wounded, 6643 missing; total, 23,186. 
The total Confederate loss was 36,000. Had Meade known the extent of his 
triumph he might have followed and destroyed the retreating Lee, whose army 
in this campaign dwindled from 100,000 to 40,000. 

On the same memorable day, July 3d, Vicksburg, after having resisted 
many and determined assaults, and after finding its defenders on the south 
surprised and beaten in detail by Grant's army aided by Commodore Porter's 
naval operations, surrendered, closing a campaign in which Grant had taken 
37,000 prisoners, with arms and munitions for 60,000 men. His own loss was 
943 killed, 7095 wounded, and 537 missing; a total of 8515. These two 
notable victories were the turning points in the war. 

Meantime, in the West the war had been pursued during the year with 
varying fortunes. The Confederate General Forrest had captured 1500 men 
at Murfreesboro, Tenn.; Kirby Smith had captured 5000 Unionists at Richmond, 
Ky. ; General Bragg had captured 4000 prisoners at Mumfordsville, Tenn. ; 
Generals McCook and Rousseau, having attacked the enemy without the orders 
of General Buell, and thinking, as General Buell said, to win a victory without 
his assistance, were defeated by General Bragg at Perryville, whose loss was 
2300 : our loss was 4340. General Rosecrans, with a loss of 782, whipped the 
Confederate General Price, at Iuka, Miss., whose loss was 1000 men. Rose- 
crans repulsed again the Confederates on September 17th at Corinth, inflicting 
a loss of 1423 killed and taking 2248 prisoners. His own loss was 2359 men. 
A brigade of 2000 Unionists was captured by John Morgan. A campaign of 
46,910 men under Rosecrans culminated in the battle of Stone River, January 
2d, 1863, against Bragg, who was beaten and forced to retreat. The Unionist 



3 o8 THE STORY OF AM URIC A. 

losses were 1533 killed, 7245 wounded, 2800 missing; a total of 11,57s. 
Bragg's loss was 9000 killed and wounded and over 1000 missing. The Con- 
federate Van Dorn surprised and took prisoners 2000 men at Holly Springs, 
and at the same time took #,4,000,000 worth of stores. General Sherman was 
repulsed at Chi( kasaw Bayou with a loss of 2000 men ; but General J. A. Mc- 
Clernand reduced Fort Hindman, capturing 5000 prisoners and 17 guns, while 
his loss was only 977. Colonel Grierson made a famous raid with 1700 cavalry 
to Baton Rouge, cutting Confederate communications and taking 500 prisoners. 
At Milliken's Bend the Unionist General Dennis, having 1400, repelled an 
.nt. 11 k of the Confederate General H. McCulloch, the loss on either side being 
500. At Helena, Arkansas, the Unionist General B. M. Prentiss, with 4000, 
also repulsed General Holmes with 3646, of whom 1636 were lost. The Con- 
federate raider, Morgan, with a mounted force of 4000 men, invaded Ohio, 
July 7th, but was caught by gunboats and obliged to surrender. 

General Burnside, early in September, at Cumberland Gap, captured General 
Frazier with fourteen guns and 2000 men. Then came, on September 19th, the 
great battle of Chickamauga, between Rosecrans and Thomas with 55,000 men 
on one side, and Bragg and 1 ,ongstreet with about the same number on the other 
side. Longstreet annihilated Rosecrans' rightwing ; but Thomas by his firmness 
and skill saved the day. The Confederates lost 18,000, while the Union loss was 
id || killed, 9262 wounded, 4945 missing ; total, 15,581. Our army fell back on 
( !hattanooga. Longstreet' s attempt, Nov. 28th, to dislodge Burnside from Knox- 
ville resulted in his own loss of 800 and retreat. The Unionists lost 100 men. 

( In September 22A to 24th the forces of General George H. Thomas, rein- 
forced by General Sherman, under the command of Grant, assaulted Bragg's 
army on Mission Ridge, facing Chattanooga. General Sherman crossed the 
Tennessee to attempt a flank movement hut was repulsed. General Hooker 
moved tip Lookout Mountain and drove the Confederates before him, capturing 
men and guns. Then General G. II. Thomas, in accordance with his original 
plan of Wattle, moved his army by the front directly up the heights of Mission 
Ridge, assailing the enemy in the very teeth of his batteries. The fight was 
desperate, but Thoma s's forces won, driving the- enemy, making many prisoners 
and capturing many guns. The Union losses were 757 killed, 4520 wounded, 
330 missing ; total, 5616. There were 6142 prisoners captured from the enemy. 

During this time Charleston, which had inaugurated the Rebellion, pluckily 
resisted all attempts to take it. For example, her defenders beat back 6000 
Unionists with .1 loss of 574 men al Secessionville June 10th. Again, they dis- 
abled two of the blockading gunboats on January tst, 1803 ; again, they forced 
nine bombarding iron-clads under Commodore Dupont to retire; again, they 
repulsed from Fort Wagner a storming party under General Gilmore, inflicting 
a loss of 1500, while their loss was but 100 men ; again, while obliged to evacuate 



/ GREAT FIGHT. 



309 



Fort Wagner, leaving 1 8 guns there, and 

seven guns in Battery Gregg, they re 

pulsed the Unionists' attempt to scale 

Fort Sumter and slew 200 men. 

Nor did the Unionists fare better 

in Florida. They lost under 

( ieneral T. Seymour 2000 of 

his 6000 troops at < >lustee, 

where the Confederates lost 

but 730 men. The Unionists 

again lost 

1600 out of 

m I • 
2000 men 

under Gen. 




RETREAT OF l.l.l.'s ARMY. 



Wessels at 

Mymouth, 
North Caro- 
ina, when 

the ( ollti d 

crate ( ieneral I hike's loss 

was but 300 men. 

In the Southwest, 
lowever, the Unionists' 
cause had gained con 
siderable advantages un- 
der ( ieneral Banks, having 
a command of 30,000 men. 
Aided by Commodore 
Farragut, at Alexandria, 
La., he drove ( ieneral l\. 
Taylor and captured 2000 
prisoners, several steam 
boats, and 22 guns. I lis 
assault, however, on Port 
I I iid on, in June, was re- 
pelled with a loss of 2000 



3 io THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

men, while the Confederates lost but 300 men. But Port Hudson, as it was about 
to be cannonaded by the gunboats set free by the fall of Vicksburg, was surren- 
dered, July 6th, by the Confederate General Gardener, with his garrison of 6408 
men. Banks' effective force had been reduced to 10,000. His total captures 
during the campaign were 10,584 men, y t, guns, and 6000 small arms. But 
Brashear City had some days before been surprised and captured by General R. 
Taylor (Confederate) with a Union loss of 1000 men and 10 guns. The Unionist 
General Dudley lost near Donaldsonville 300 prisoners, and again, the Unionist 
General Franklin with a fleet and 4000 men was repelled with a loss of two gun- 
boats, 15 guns, and 250 men, by less than that number within the fort at Sabine 
Pass, and at Teche Bayou the 67th Indiana Regiment was captured entire. 

The Red River expeditions in March and April, 1864, toward Shreveport 
under General Banks, from New Orleans, with a force of 40,000, and under 
General Steel, from Little Rock, with 12,000, were disastrous failures. The 
former had to retreat with a loss of about 5000, and the latter was also beaten 
back with a loss of 2200; but at Jenkins Ferry he repulsed the Coniederate 
attack led by General Kirby Smith, with a loss of 2300. In August of this year 
(1864) Commodore Farragut executed one of the fiercest and most heroic 
naval combats on record. Having lashed himself to the mast of the Hartford, he 
advanced with a fleet of 14 wooden steamers and gunboats and four iron-clad 
monitors against Forts Morgan and Gaines, at the entrance of Mobile Bay. 
He ran the bows of his wooden vessels full speed against the rebel iron-clad 
Tennessee, gaining a notable victory, which ended in the fall of the forts and 
the city of Mobile. 

General Grant was appointed Commander-in-chief of all the Union armies 
on March 1, 1864. Having sent Sherman to conduct a campaign in the West, he 
himself, on May 4 and 5, crossed the Rapidan for a direct southerly advance to 
Richmond. A campaign of 43 days followed, in which more than 100,000 men, 
frequently reinforced, were engaged on either side. He was met by Lee in the 
Wilderness, where, after two days of terrible slaughter, the battle ended without 
decided advantage to either side. Among the Unionists, General J. S. Wads- 
worth was killed and seven generals were wounded, the entire loss amount- 
ing to 20,000 men. The Confederates lost 8000 men, with Longstreet badly 
wounded. 

Finding Lee's position impregnable. Grant advanced by a flank movement 
to Spottsylvania Court House. Here, on May nth, Hancock, by a desperate 
assault, captured Generals Johnson and E. H. Stewart, with 3000 men and 
30 guns, while Lee himself barely escaped. But no fighting, however desperate, 
could carrv Pec's works. Sheridan with his cavalry now made a dashing raid 
toward Richmond. He fought the Confederate cavalry, killed their General, 
J. E. B. Stuart, and returned, having suffered little damage, to Grant. General 



A GREAT FIGHT. 



3" 



Butler with 30,000 men steamed up the James River and seized City Point, with 
the view of seizing Petersburg. He was, however, too slow, and in a fight with 
Beauregard, near Proctor's Creek, lost 4000 men, while the Confederates lost 
but 3000. 

General Grant reached, May ifth, the North Anna, where he gained some 
advantage, but as Lee was strongly intrenched, he moved on again to Cold 
Harbor. Here an assault on Lee ended with a Union loss of 1705 killed, 9072 
wounded and 2406 missing. Sheridan again raided Lee's rear, tore up rail- 
roads, and burnt stores, and after having lost 735 men he returned to Grant with 
370 prisoners. Grant now pressed on toward the James River ; assaults were 




F.TTYsr.rKC rFMFTFRY. 



made on Petersburg with a loss of many killed and 5000 prisoners. The 
Unionist General Wilson, with 8000 cavalry, while tearing up the Danville 
railroad, lost 1000 prisoners. 

Another attempt to take Petersburg by a mine explosion resulted in a 
Unionist loss of 4400 and Confederate loss of 1000. A series of gallant 
attacks by the Unionists were as gallantly repulsed. Thus Hancock assailed 
Lee's left wing below Richmond, losing 5000 men. Warren seized the Weldon 
Railroad, at the expense of 4450, while the Confederates lost but 1 200. Han- 
cock's attempt to seize Ream's Station ended in his being driven back and 



312 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

losing 2400 men. Warren grasped the Squirrel Level Road at a cost of 2500 
men. Butler, however, took Port Harrison, with 115 guns, but failed to take 
Fort Gilmore after a loss of 300. The Confederates, attempting to retake Fort 
Harrison, were beaten back with a heavy loss. The Union cavalry under Gen- 
eral Kautz advanced within five miles of Richmond, but were driven back with 
a loss of 9 guns and 500 men. Hancock tried to turn the Confederate flank 
and took 1000 prisoners, but had to retire with a loss of 1500. 

Thus this campaign of 1864 closed with a loss in the aggregate of 87,387 
men from the Army of the Potomac. 

In West Virginia Sigel was routed at New Market by J. C. Breckinridge 
with a loss of six guns and 700 men. Hunter, succeeding Sigel, beat the Con- 
federates, June 8th, at Piedmont, killing General Jones and taking 1500 men, but 
was himself, with 20,000 men, soon after beaten at Lynchburg, and forced to a 
disastrous retreat over the Alleghanies to the Potomac. 

This opened the way for the Confederate, Early, with 20,000 veterans, to 
march northward. With a loss of but 600 he defeated General Lew Wallace 
near Frederick, killing and capturing 2000 men. After threatening Baltimore 
and Washington he retreated South with 2500 captured horses and 5000 cattle. 
He also defeated at Winchester General Crook, whose loss was 1200. Shortly 
after the Unionist General Averill defeated B. F. Johnson's cavalry and took 
500 prisoners. 

Not long after, on September 19, 1864, Early, after a brilliant attack by 
Sheridan at Winchester, was routed, losing 6000 men, while the Unionists lost 
1000 less. At Fisher's Hill Sheridan again routed him, taking 16 guns and 
1 1 00 prisoners; at Cedar Creek, while Sheridan was absent at Washington, 
Early made a sudden and determined assault, throwing the Unionists into a panic- 
stricken mob, capturing 24 guns and 1200 prisoners. Sheridan, by his famous 
ride <>f twenty miles, met his beaten army. He reorganized it, inspired it to 
make a general and magnificent attack, and won a great victory, recapturing 
his 24 guns, taking 23 more, and 1500 prisoners. The loss on either side 
was about 3000. 

In the Southwest General Sturgis (Union) with 12,000 men routed General 
Forrest at Guntown, Miss., killing and capturing 4000. In East Tennessee 
the Confederate raider Morgan captured 1600 Unionists at Licking River, but 
was himself soon after chased away with a loss of half his force. During these 
operations General Sherman advanced (May 18, 1864) with 100,000 men from 
Chattanooga. He was stubbornly resisted by General J. E. Johnston with an 
army of 54,000. At Kenesaw Mountain Sherman lost 3000 men while the 
Confederates lost 442. He, however, kept flanking and fighting the Confed- 
erates until he reached Atlanta, during which two months the enemy had lost 
14,200 men: but reinforcements kept their numbers up to 51,000. During 



SHERMAN'S MARCH. 



313 



these movements the Confederate General Polk, who on accepting his commis- 
sion in the army had not resigned his position as a Bishop of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church, was killed by a cannon ball while reconnoitring on Pine 
Mountain, a few miles north of Marietta. Hood succeeded Johnston, and 
aimed a heavy blow at Thomas, on Sherman's right, losing 4000 and inflicting 




1 ".m:.i ki ■!■ 1 kmmi; 1 [M. at i:ka<;<;'s HFA1k.iUARTF.RS 



a loss of but 1500. On the 2 2d occurred another great battle in which 
McPherson, a very superior Union general, was killed, and 4000 Unionists 
were lost. The Confederate loss was, however, not less than 8000. General 
Stoneman whilst raiding Hood's rear was captured, with 1000 of his cavalry. 
Hood, after suffering a heavy repulse by Logan, and another at Jonesboro 
by Howard, in the latter of which he lost 2000, and still another by }. C. 



3 i4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Davis, when Jonesboro and many guns and prisoners were taken from 
him, retreated eastward, leaving Atlanta, September ist, to the Union victors. 
Being reinforced, however, so as to have about 55,000 troops, he returned for 
an invasion of Tennessee. At Franklin, November 30th, he made a desperate 
onset against Schofield, and was baffled, at an expense of 4500 men to himself 
and of 2320 to the Union. At Nashville, to which he laid siege, he was struck 
by Thomas, December 15th, with great skill and determination during a two 
days' battle, and broken to pieces, having lost more than 13,000, besides seventy- 
two pieces of artillery. The Union loss was 10,000 during the campaign. In 
November and December Sherman at the head of 65,500, including the cavalry 
protection of Kilpatrick, executed his famous march to the sea, i.e., from Atlanta 
to Savannah. His reward was 167 guns and 1328 prisoners and a demoralized 
South. The Confederate General Hardee, who had already evacuated Savan- 
nah, was obliged by a new advance of Sherman northward, February, 1865, 
to evacuate Charleston also, with 12,000 men. A cavalry engagement took 
place near the north line of South Carolina, between Kilpatrick and Wade 
Hampton, in which the former was surprised, but the latter finally beat him. 
Near Fayetteville, North Carolina, March 15th, he was attacked without success 
by Hardee, now acting under Joseph Johnston, having 40,000 men under his 
command ; and three days after at Bentonville by Johnston himself. Sherman 
lost 1643, but forced Johnston to retire, leaving 267 dead and 1625 prisoners 
and wounded. 

Fort Fisher, that protected the blockade runners at Wilmington, N. C, was 
bombarded by Commodore Porter and carried by assault by General A. H. 
Terry, January 16, 1865. This victory, purchased at a cost of 410 killed and 
536 wounded, threw into the Union hands 169 guns and 20S3 prisoners. And 
Wilmington itself fell about one month later, under an attack by Schofield. 

General James H. Wilson, with 15,000 cavalry from the armies of Grant 
and Thomas, routed General Forrest at Selma, Ala., April 2d, capturing 22 
guns and 2700 prisoners and burning 125,000 bales of cotton. Soon after, he 
captured at Columbus, Ga., 52 guns and 1200 prisoners, besides burning a 
gunboat, 250 cars, and 115,000 cotton bales. He took Fort Tyler by assault, 
but ceased operations at Macon, Ga., because by that time the rebellion was 
crushed. 

General Grant resumed operations February 6, 1865, when he repulsed at 
Hatcher's Run, at a cost of 2000 troops, the Confederates, who lost 1000. 
General Sheridan with 10,000 cavalry routed Early, on March 2d, from Waynes- 
boro, taking 11 guns and 1600 prisoners, and joined Grant at Petersburg after 
having passed entirely around Lee's army. An attack by Lee against Fort 
Stedman was repelled with a loss of 2500 to the Unionists and 4500 to the 
Confederates. 



LEE'S SURRENDER. 315 

Grant, fearing that Lee might attempt to evacuate Richmond, threw 
Warren's corps and Sheridan's cavalry to the southwest of Petersburg. 
Warren, alter having his divisions broken by Lee but re-formed by the aid of 
Griffin, united with Sheridan, who had been foiled the day before, April 1st, at 
Five Forks. Warren and Sheridan now charged the Confederates' works, 
which were taken, along with 5000 prisoners. A general assault was made by 
the Union army at daylight, April 2d, when Ord's Corps (Union) carried Forts 
Gregg and Alexander by storm. A. P. Hill, a brilliant Confederate general, 
was shot dead. That night Lee evacuated Richmond, burning his warehouses 
filled with stores. General Weitzel, at 6 a.m. April 3d, entered the city with 
his men and was soon followed by President Lincoln. Petersburg was at the 
same time abandoned. Lee halted his army, now dwindled to 35,000 men, at 
Amelia Court House. Grant rapidly pursued. Ewell was severed from Lee's 
rear and became one among 6000 prisoners. Lee heroically pushed on to 
Appomattox Court House, where his flight was intercepted by Sherman marching 
from the South. Lee was inclined to renew the fighting against Sherman, but 
his weary and famished army stood no chance against the fearful odds around 
them. And Lee, to prevent further useless bloodshed, surrendered his army to 
Grant on April 9, 1865, within three days of four years after the rebellion had 
been opened by the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Bell ringing, triumphant 
salutes, and boundless joy throughout the United States hailed this event as the 
close of the war. Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman at Raleigh, N. C, 
April 26th, and Dick Taylor his, to Canby at Citronville. Ala., May 4th. The 
terms of the surrender were magnanimous : " Each officer and man was allowed 
to return to his home, not to be disturbed by the United States authority so 
long as they observed their paroles and the laws in force where they may 
reside." 

Jefferson Davis, the president of the now destroyed Confederacy, fled from 
Richmond at the time of its evacuation. Attended at first with a cavalry escort 
of 2000, which soon dwindled mostly away, he was making his way toward the 
coast, with his family and "a few faithful followers " when he was captured near 
Irwinsville, Georgia. After an imprisonment of two years in Fortress Monroe, 
he was released, and allowed to live without molestation, mourning the lost 
cause, until he died, December 6, 1889. 

The Union soldiers numbered during the war 2,666,999, °f which 294,266 
were drafted, the rest being volunteers. The deaths on the field or from 
wounds amounted to 5221 officers and 90,868 men, while 2321 officers 182,329 
men died from disease or accident. The Confederate armies enrolled were 
600,000 men, of whom they lost more than one-half. The Confederate cruisers, 
the "Alabama," "Florida," " Georgia," "Sumter," and "Tallahassee," most of 



3 l6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



which were fitted out in British ports, well nigh destroyed American commerce. 
The "Alabama," commanded by Raphael Semmes, went down off the French 
coast, June 19, 1864, in a memorable action with the U. S. S. "Kearsarge," 
commanded by Captain Winslow. 

The greatest act of Abraham Lincoln was his Emancipation Proclamation, 
issued January 1, 1S63, giving freedom to 4,000,000 of slaves. 

And so ended the great internecine conflict, which has made us a strong, 
consolidated, free nation, never again, let us hope, to be given over to fraternal 
strife. 










LINCOLN'S GRAVE. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

SOME FORGOTTEN LESSONS OE THE WAR. 



By COLONEL A. K. McCLURE, 

Editor and Proprietor of the Philadelphia Tin, 



Before all those who more or less actively participated in the civil or 
military events of our Civil War shall have passed away, it might be well 
to crystallize into history some of its forgotten lessons. The young student 
of to-day, who must turn to history for all knowledge of the dark days of 
the. bloodiest civil war of modern times, can be easily and fully informed 

as to all important political events and the 
many battles which were fought between 
the blue and the gray. But there are 
many facts and incidents connected with 
the origin and prosecution of that memo- 
rable conflict which have no place in the 
annals of history, but which exercised a 
very great, and at times a controlling, 
influence in shaping the policy of the 
Government, and even in deciding the 
issues of the war itself. It is to some of 
these apparently forgotten lessons of the 
great conflict I propose to give a chapter 
that I hope may be entertaining and 
instructive. 

When we turn aside from the beaten 
colonei \ k mcclure historical paths to explore the forgotten 

issues and movements of more than thirty 
years ago, we are startled at the magnitude of questions in those days which 
seem now to be accepted as incapable of controversy. The student of to-day 
only sees the fact that the issues between slavery and freedom were natural 
and irrepressible, and that in such a contest, with a vast preponderance of 
numbers, wealth, and physical and moral power, there could be but one result 
from such a struggle ; but there are few to-day who have knowledge of the 
intrenched power of slavery, not only in our commercial cities, but throughout 

3'7 




3i8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the whole business interests of the country, and it will doubtless surprise many 
readers when they are told that even as late as September, 1862, when 'the war 
had been in progress for nearly two years, scores of thousands of thoroughly 
loyal supporters of the Government in every State shuddered at the idea of 
Emancipation. It will be equally sur- 
prising to the students of American 
history to-day to learn that the great 
mass of the people of both sections 
of the country were so 
profoundly interested in 




THE SWAMP ANGEL BATTERY BOMBARDING CHARLESTON. 



•—. . averting fraternal conflict that only the 
madness of the secession leaders forced 
the North to unite in the support of the war by wantonly firing upon the 
starving and helpless garrison of Fort Sumter when its peaceable surrender 
could have been accomplished within a few hours thereafter. So general and 
deep-seated was the aversion to war in the North, that had the Government 



RELUCTANCE OF THE NORTH TO FIGHT. 



319 



commenced hostilities, even after the capture of the national forts and arsenals 
which had been seized by the insurgents, the North would have been hope- 
lessly divided on the question of supporting the Government. 

While it is probable that the slavery issue would have culminated in civil 
war some time during the present century, I feel entirely warranted in assuming 




GENERAL SHERIDAN TURNING DEFEAT INTO VICTORY AT CEDAR CREEK. 

that the sectional conflict begun in 1861 would not have reached an appeal to 
the sword but for the fact that both sections mutually believed the other incapa- 
ble of accepting civil war. Had the Northern and Southern people understood 
each other then as well as they understood each other after the soldiers of the 
blue and gray had exhibited their matchless heroism on so many battlefields, 
the election and inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President would not have 



320 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

precipitated war. Civil war had been threatened by alarmists and agitators in 
and out of Congress for many years, and many of the Southern leaders grew 
offensively arrogant in discussing sectional issues during the debates in Con- 
gress, for several years before the election of Lincoln. It was not uncommon 
for Northern men to be taunted as cowards because they refused to accept the 
code of honor, and finally, when the secession of States began, it was the 
almost universal belief throughout the South that the Northern people were 
mere money getters, and incapable of heroic action even in defense of their 
convictions. The South assumed that the North would not fight, because it was 
believed that the Northern people were so averse to fighting that they would 
submit even to dissolution of the government rather than risk their lives for its 
defense. On the other hand, the Northern people believed the Southerners to 
be led by bombasts who would take pause in their aggressive actions whenever 
compelled to face the fearful realities of actual war. 

I have never forgotten an incident that occurred in a party caucus in the 
Pennsylvania Legislature, held on the night after the surrender of Sumter. I 
was then a Senator and in political accord with the majority of both branches 
of the Legislature that heartily sustained President Lincoln. The occasion was 
so grave that the caucus met in secret session, and the first half dozen speeches 
ridiculed the idea of actual war, because the Southern people were bombasts 
and cowards, and some of the speakers boldly declared that the Northern 
women could sweep away to the South of the Potomac, with their brooms, these 
blatant warriors. Having studied the situation both North and South, as Chair- 
man of the Military Committee of the Senate, I ventured to correct the errone- 
ous impressions created by the speakers, saying that the Southerners were of 
our own blood and lineage, had shared all our heroism in the achievements 
of the past, and that if we should become involved in civil war, it would be one 
of the most desperate and bloody wars of history. My declaration that the South 
would fight as heroically as the North was hissed from every section of the caucus. 
How fearfully true my statements and predictions were, was soon attested on the 
many battlefields, from the first Bull Run to Appomattox. No one then could 
have believed that the South would marshal and maintain an army of half a 
million men, to display the highest measure of heroism and sacrifice to overthrow 
the noblest government of the earth, and none could then have believed that 
the Northern people would furnish and maintain more than a million men during 
four long years of the bloodiest conflict, as the price of the perpetuity of the 
Republic. Had we known each other better then ; had we known that the 
soldiers of both the North and the South would make Grecian and Roman story 
pale before their heroism in fraternal conflict, I doubt not that the Civil War 
begun in 1861 would have been postponed for a future generation. 

The first gun fired against Sumter, on the 12th of April, 1S61, sounded 



THE FIRST OVERT ACTS. 321 

the death knell of the Southern Confederacy and of slavery ; and had the first 
gun of the war been fired by Major Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter, 
against any of the Confederate batteries erected to bombard him and his little 
command, the North would have 
been divided on the vital 
issue of supporting the - 
Government, and even 
revolution 




than possible. 



in the North 
would have 
been more 
Mr. Lincoln was 
inaugurated on the 4th of March, 
and from that time until the 
bombardment of Sumter the 
provisional Confederate Govern- 
ment, then located at Montgomery, Ala- 
bama, committed acts of war against the 
National Government, by seizing forts and 
arsenals, and by erecting batteries at Charleston, within range of Major 
Anderson's guns, to make his fort defenseless. With all these preparations 
tor war on the part of the South, begun during the last three months of 



DEATH OK Gl Nil: \L Pi 



322 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Buchanan's Administration and continued after Lincoln's inauguration, the 
Government was entirely helpless to defend its forts and property. The forts 
could not be reinforced because the small standing army at that day was 
utterly unequal to the task. Nine important forts in six Southern States were 
garrisoned by but a handful of men, without supplies in case of siege, or means 
of defense in case of assault from batteries whose construction could not be 
impeded, as to fire upon them would have been an act of war. The Govern- 
ment was not only unable to man its forts and defend them and the arsenals 
of the South, but neither President Buchanan nor President Lincoln dared to 
call for an increase of the army. Had either of them done so, it would have 
been an open menace of war to coerce the rebellious States back into the 
Union ; it would have inflamed the South into precipitating the conflict, and 
would not have been sustained by the people in the North. 

Thus was the Government utterly helpless to hinder preparations for war 
by the new Confederacy. Many of the ablest and most patriotic men of both 
parties of the North doubted the right of the Government to coerce a State 
by the bayonet, and had either Buchanan or Lincoln called for an increase of 
the army, or attempted to recapture forts and arsenals seized by the South, it 
would have been regarded as needlessly hastening a conflict that all hoped 
could be avoided. It was the midsummer madness of the Southern Confed- 
eracy in precipitating the war by firing upon the starved and feeble garrison of 
Sumter that obliterated the issue of "coercion," and that practically united the 
North in sustaining the Government in an aggressive war policy. So entirely 
were we unprepared for war, that the President had no authority to call out 
troops, even after Sumter had been fired upon, and the President's proclamation 
summoning 75,000 volunteers for three months' service had to be legalized by 
subsequent act of Congress. The discussion of the propriety or impropriety 
of war was summarily ended when war was actually declared by the Charleston 
batteries hurling their hot shot into Sumter ; and from that day until the sur- 
render of the Confederate armies, after the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands 
of lives and countless treasure, the North was inspired by its patriotism to 
prosecute the war until the Rebellion should be overthrown and the authority of 
the Government established in every State of the Union. 

Had the Confederate Government been content to hold the forts and 
arsenals it had seized without bloodshed, and waited for the General Govern- 
ment to precipitate war, the conflict would have been indefinitely postponed and 
the Confederacy would have become so strong by the passive assent of the 
Government to its establishment that its overthrow might have been impossible. 
Certain it is that if President Lincoln had opened the war by firing upon the 
Southern forces, except in defense of assailed Government troops, he could not 
have commanded anything approaching a united support from the Northern 



3 -'4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

people ; he would have been fearfully censured as having wantonly engaged in 
a great war over issues that might have been adjusted peaceably by patience ; 
and none can now assume to say what would have been the issue of such a con- 
flict with the North bitterly divided because of a sectional war precipitated by 
the aggressive action of the Government. It was the first gun fired against 
Sumter that crystallized the North, that gave Lincoln the power to summon 
patriotic armies to defend the Republic, and that assured, in the fullness of time, 
the utter overthrow of the Confederacy and the re-establishment of the great 
American Republic without the blot of slavery upon its escutcheon. 

The naval warfare of the world was revolutionized in a single day by the 
battle between the " Merrimac " and the " Monitor" at Fortress Monroe, on the 
9th of March, 1862. It was the most sudden and startling revolution ever 
attained in methods of warfare, and it was a revelation to every nation of 
the earth. The United States steam frigate " Merrimac " was set on fire at the 
Gosport Navy Yard at the outbreak of the war, when hastily abandoned by 
the Federal navy officers. It was burned to the water's edge and sunk, but 
soon after the Confederates raised the hull, which was not seriously damaged, 
and its engines in yet reasonably good condition, and they hurriedly under- 
took the then original conception of converting it into an iron clad. A 
powerful prow of cast iron was attached to its stem, a few feet undei water, 
and projecting sufficiently to enable it to break in the side of any wooden 
vessel. A low wooden roof two feet thick was built at an incline of about 
36 degrees, and this was plated with double iron armor, making a four-inch 
iron plating. Under this protection were mounted two broadside batteries 
of four guns each, and a gun at the stem and stern. The Government was 
soon advised of the raising of the hull of the "Merrimac," and without having 
detailed information on the subject, knew that a powerful iron-clad was 
being constructed. A board of naval officers had been selected by the 
Government to consider the various suggestions for the construction of 
iron-clad vessels, and although, as a rule, naval officers had little faith in the 
experiment, Congress coerced them into action by the appropriation of half 
a million dollars for the work. The Naval Board recommended a trial of 
three of the most acceptable plans presented, and they were put under 
contract. 

Among those who pressed the adoption of light iron-clads, capable of 
penetrating our shallow harbors, river's, and bayous, was John Ericsson. 
He was a Swede by birth, but had long been an American citizen, and exhibited 
uncommon genius and scientific attainments in engineering. The vessel he 
proposed to build was to be only 127 feet in length, 27 feet in width, and 
12 feet deep, to be covered by a flat deck rising only one or two feet above 
water. The only armament of the vessel was to be a revolving turret, about 



326 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

20 feet in diameter and nine feet high, made of plated wrought iron aggre- 
gating eight inches in thickness, with two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns. The 
guns were so constructed that they could be fired as the turret revolved, and 
the port-hole would be closed immediately after firing. The size of the 
" Merrimac " was well known to the Government to be quite double the length 
and breadth of the " Monitor," but it had the disadvantage of requiring 
nearly double the depth of water in which to manoeuvre it. Various 
sensational reports were received from time to time of the progress made 
on the " Merrimac," the name of which was changed by the Confederates to 
"Virginia," and as we had only wooden hulls at Fortress Monroe to resist it, 
great solicitude was felt for the safety of the fleet and the maintenance oi' 
the blockade. While the Government hurried the construction of the new 
iron-clads to the utmost, little faith was felt that such fragile vessels as 
the " Monitor " could cope with so powerful an engine of war as the " Merrimac." 
The most formidable vessels of the navy, including the " Minnesota," the twin 
ship of the original "Merrimac," the "St. Lawrence," the "Roanoke," the 
"Congress," and the "Cumberland," were all there waiting the advent of the 
" Merrimac." 

On Saturday, the 8th of March, the "Merrimac" appeared- at the mouth 
of the Elizabeth River and steamed directly for the Federal fleet. All the 
vessels slipped cable and started to enter the conflict, but the heavier ships soon 
ran aground and became helpless. The " Merrimac " hurried on, and after 
firing a broadside at the "Congress," crashed into the sides of the "Cumber- 
land," whose brave men fired broadside after broadside at -their assailant only 
to see their balls glance from its mailed roof. An immense hole had been 
broken into the hull by the prow of the " Merrimac," and in a very few minutes 
the "Cumberland" sank in fifty feet of water, her last gun being fired when 
the water had reached its muzzle, and the whole gallant crew went to the bottom 
with their flag still flying from the masthead. The "Merrimac" then turned 
upon the " Congress." It was compelled to flee from such a hopeless struggle, 
and was finally grounded near the shore ; but the " Merrimac," selecting a 
position where her guns could rake her antagonist, after a bloody fight of more 
than an hour, with the commander killed and the ship on fire, the "Congress" 
struck her flag, and was soon blown up by the explosion of her magazine. 
Most fortunately for the Federal fleet, the "Merrimac" had not started out on 
its work of destruction until after midday. Its iron prow had been broken in 
breaching the "Cumberland," and after the fierce broadsides it had received 
from the "Congress" and the "Cumberland," with the other vessels firing 
repeatedly during the hand-to-hand conflict, the "Merrimac" was content to 
withdraw for the day, and anchored for the night under the Confederate shore 
batteries on Sewall's Point. 



ADVENT OF THE "MONITOR." 



'-7 



,~*2L^- 



V 



The nio-ht of March 8th was probably the gloomiest period of the war. It 

was well known at Fortress Monroe and at Washington that the " Merrimac" 

would resume its work on the following day, and it was equally well known that 

there were neither vessels nor batteries 

t 
to offer any serious resistance to its ( 

work. With the fleet destroyed and 
the blockade raised, not only Washing- 
ton, but even New 
York, might be at the 
mercy of this new 
and invincible engine 
of war. There did not 
seem to be even a sil- 
ver lining to the dark 
cloud that hung over 
the Union cause ; but 



\ deliverance came 
i most unexpectedly, as 
j some time during the 
night the little "Moni- 
was seen, by the light of 
yet burning "Congress," 
towed into the waters of Hampton 
Roads. It was viewed with con- 
tempt by the naval officers and 
described as "a raft with a cheese 
box on top of it" ; but Lieutenant 
Worden, who commanded the 
little iron-clad, after being advised 
of the situation, boldly took his 
position, after midnight, near the 
still helpless "Minnesota," thus 
challenging the whole fury of the "Merrimac" upon the "Monitor." On 
Sunday morning, the 9th of March, the "Merrimac" sailed out defiantly to 
complete its work of destruction and thus make itself master of the capital, 
of New York, and, presumably, end the Richmond campaign then contem- 




*s&^^^ 



MOIST WEATHER AT THE FRONT 



328 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

plated, and the little "Monitor" sailed out boldly to meet it. The history of 
that conflict need not be repeated. To the utter amazement of the commander 
of the "Merrimac," the "Monitor" was impervious to its terrible broadsides, 
while its lightness and shallow draft enabled it to out-manceuvre its antagonist 
at every turn ; and while it did not fire one gun for ten of its adversary, its 
aim was precise and the "Merrimac" was materially worsted in the conflict. 
After three hours of desperate battle the defiant and invincible " Merrimac " of the 
day before was compelled to give up the contest and retreat back to Norfolk. 

It was this single naval conflict, and the signal triumph of the little 
" Monitor," that revolutionized the whole naval warfare of the world in a single 
day, and from that time until the present the study of all nations for aggressive 
or defensive warfare has been the perfection of the iron-clad. To the people 
of the present time the iron-clad is so familiar, and its discussion so common, 
that few recall the fact that only thirty years ago it was unknown, and little 
dreamed of as an important implement of war. It is notable that neither of 
those vessels which inaugurated iron-clad warfare, and made it at once the 
accepted method of naval combat for the world, ever afterward engaged in 
battle during the three years of war which continued. The "Merrimac" was 
constantly feared as likely to make a new incursion against our fleet, but her 
commander never again ventured to lock horns with the "Monitor" and the 
additional iron-clads which were soon added to the navy. Early in May the 
capture of Norfolk by General Wool placed the "Merrimac" in a position of 
such peril that on the i ith of May, 1862, she was fired by her commander and 
crew and abandoned, and soon after was made a hopeless wreck by the explosion 
of her magazine. The fate of the "Monitor" was even more tragic. The 
following December, when being towed off Cape Hatteras, she foundered in a 
gale and went to the bottom with a portion of her officers and men ; but she 
had taught the practicability of iron-clads in naval warfare, and when she went 
down a whole fleet was under construction after her own model, and some 
vessels already in active service. 

One of the forgotten lessons of the war is given in the singular fatality that 
attended the formidable iron-clad vessels constructed by the Confederacy. The 
South not only furnished the first iron-clad of the war, but it constructed others 
which were confidently and reasonably relied upon to raise the blockade in both 
Savannah and New Orleans. The Confederates had converted the English iron- 
clad steamer Fingal, one of the successful blockade runners, into one of the 
most powerful iron-clad war vessels constructed by either side during the war. 
It was regarded by all as the most dangerous engine of war that had yet been 
produced; and when Admiral Dupont ordered two of his best monitors, the 
" Weehawken " and the " Nahant," to accept the "Atlanta's " challenge of battle, 
the gravest fears were cherished by the Admiral as to the issue of the conflict. 



DEFEAT OF THE "ATLANTA. 



3-9 



So confident were the officers of the "Atlanta" and the people of Savannah of 
the speedy and complete victory of the new Confederate iron-clad, that when 
the "Atlanta," on the 17th of June, 1S63, steamed out to give battle, it was 
accompanied by steamers brilliantly decorated with flags and crowded with men 
and women, the elite of the city, to witness the destruction of the Union fleet. 




DEATH OF MAXIMILIAN. 



The "Atlanta" opened the battle, but the Federal monitors were silent 
they got the exact range desired, when a ball from the "Weehawken " struck 
the side of the "Atlanta," penetrated its armor, and prostrated half the fighting 
force of the vessel by the concussion. The second shot struck the "Atlanta" 
and seriously damaged its plating ; the third wounded both the pilots and 



330 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

demolished the pilot house ; and the fourth and final shot crashed through a 
port shutter. So stunning was the first shot received by the "Atlanta" from 
the " Weehawken " that the "Atlanta" never again fired a gun, as it became 
unmanageable and entirely at the mercy of its adversary. Thus in a very few 
minutes after the battle opened the Confederate iron-clad displaced its colors 
with the white flag, and it was regarded as one of the grandest naval prizes of the 
war. The captured iron-clad was towed away by the victors and reconstructed 
for service in the Federal navy, but on the 6th of December, 1863, when with 
the fleet within Charleston Harbor, a rough sea caught it, heavily laden with 
shells, and before relief could come it sunk to the bottom with some twenty-five 
officers and men. 

Such was the fate of the two great iron-clads of the Confederacy that were 
completed and put into action. Each fought one battle and both perished soon 
thereafter ; but the most formidable of all the iron-clads constructed by the South 
during the war, was within a few weeks of completion when Admiral Farragut 
captured New Orleans. The Admiral was advised of the construction of this 
vessel, and the fear of its completion certainly hastened his aggressive action in 
attacking the Confederate forts and fleet on the Mississippi, to enter New 
Orleans. Neither was his information in any degree at fault as to the invulner- 
able character of the new iron-clad. After the capture of New Orleans, Ad- 
miral Farragut and General Butler informed themselves minutely of this new 
engine of war, and both confessed that had it been completed before the capture 
of the city, it would have been capable of destroying Farragut's entire fleet, 
raising the blockade and defending New Orleans from capture. Most fortunately 
for the Union cause, with all the haste that could be practiced in the construc- 
tion of this vessel, it could not be made serviceable until after Farragut's 
heroic and successful assault, and it shared the fate of the first of the Confed- 
erate iron-clads by being blown up by those who had staked the highest hopes 
upon its achievements. Thus while the Confederates were eminently successful 
with their free-lance vessels assailing our commerce on the seas of the world, 
and while they conceived and accomplished much in the construction of great 
iron-clads, their vessels were all singularly fated to be valueless in promoting 
the Confederate cause. When it is remembered that had the Federal blockade 
been raised in any of our leading ports and an open port maintained, as was 
possible by each of these Confederate iron-clads, the recognition of the Con- 
federacy by England and France would have speedily followed, we may justly 
appreciate the magnitude of the succession of disasters that attended these 
Confederate engines of war. 

The civilized world dates the emancipation of slaves in the United States 
with President Lincoln's proclamation of January 1st, 1863, and all historians 
of the future will date the overthrow of bondage in our land with that 



THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 



33i 



immortal instrument. But the Emancipation Proclamation was not the end 
of slavery ; it was simply the means that crystallized the forces that led to 
universal freedom within the limits of the Republic. In point of fact, 
President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not liberate a single slave, 
and it did not even assume to overthrow slavery in all the States of the 
Union. Tennessee, Maryland, and Delaware, three slave States then in partial 
accord with the Government, and nearly one-half the territory of Virginia and 




1:IKI> S-EYE VIEW 



[HE NORTH END OF ANPERSONVILLE PRISON. 
(From a photograph.) 



In the middle-ground midway of the swamp is the " Island" which was covered with shelters after the higher ground h.td 

all been occupied. 

a considerable portion of the territory of Louisiana, were expressly excluded 
from the operations of the proclamation. It was an exercise of the extreme 
authority of the Executive under the war powers of the Constitution, and 
had it been thus carried into effect, it would have left slavery existing in five 
of the States. Congress had advanced toward emancipation to the extent 
of giving freedom to every slave that reached the Federal lines whose 
master was in rebellion against the Government, and the Emancipation 



332 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Proclamation practically accomplished nothing more. While it proclaimed 
freedom to all the slaves within the States and territory named, their actual 
freedom was not attained until our victorious armies brought them within our 
lines, and possessed the territory of the slave States. 

President Lincoln well appreciated the fact that his proclamation was 
simply the final step toward the utter overthrow of slavery, and that other 
and most important agencies were essential to the completion of the great 
work with which his name must ever be associated. A prompt movement 
was made in Congress to give completeness to the emancipation policy by a 
constitutional amendment forbidding slavery in every State and Territory 
of the Union, and one of the most desperate Congressional struggles of 
the war was precipitated by that effort. It was defeated in 1864, wanting 




LIBBY PRISON IN 1865. 



several votes of the necessary two-thirds in the House, but the same House, 
during the second session, finally adopted it, and thus slavery was abolished 
throughout the length and breadth of the land, and thus the complete 
triumph of Lincoln's Emancipation Policy was attained. But none the less 
will future generations turn back to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, 
as we do now, to date the deliverance of the great Republic of the world 
from the blistering stain of human bondage, and throughout all the peoples 
of the earth where the altar of liberty shall be known, there will the name 
of Abraham Lincoln be honored, because it gave freedom to 4,000,000 of 
bondmen. 

There are very many forgotten lessons taught on the bloody battle fields 
of our Civil War which will never be recorded in history. The battle of 
Gettysburg, the Waterloo of the Confederacy, furnishes some most conspicuous 



THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG. 333 

instances of the apparent accidents which control the destiny of great armies, 
and possibly the destiny of nations. That great battle-field had not been chosen 
by the leaders of either army. It was accident or fate, or the omnipotent 
power that rules over all, that doomed the Confederate army to be defeated 
when it was most confident of victory and best equipped in numbers, munitions, 
and confidence for a triumphant campaign. The first clay was an appalling 
disaster to the Federal army. Two army corps, embracing probably one-fourth 
of Meade's entire force, were not only defeated but routed in that engagement, 
the commanding officer killed, and the demoralized Federal forces driven 
through Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill. Had they been pursued by the Con- 




LILBY PRISON IN 1SS4, BEFOKE li- REMOVAI TO ail 



federate force that had defeated them, they could have been captured or 
scattered so as to be ineffective in the future battle ; and even after the pursuit 
had been abandoned and Confederate headquarters established on Seminary 
Hill, Round Top, that commanded the left of the Federal position, and Culp's 
Hill, that commanded its right, could have been taken without firing a gun. 
Had that been done, the most impregnable position between W'illiamsport and 
Washington could not have been held an hour the following morning, the great 
decisive battle of the war, fought between the opposing lines on Cemetery am! 
Seminary Hills, would have been unknown to history, and on no other field 
chosen by the Federal commander could Lee have been compelled to fight at 
such a disadvantage. Had Meade been defeated at Gettysburg who could 



334 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

measure the consequences? Baltimore, Philadelphia, all the teeming wealth 
of the Lancaster and Cumberland valleys, and possibly even the Capital itself, 
would have been at the mercy of the Southern victors. 

Three days' delay in the arrival of pontoon trains at Fredericksburg not 
only lost Burnside that battle, but ended in one of the most bloody assaults of 
the war, and one that was equaled only by Pickett's assault at Gettysburg in the 
wanton sacrifice of life. Burnside' s delay, caused by the failure of his pontoon 
trains, gave Lee ample time to concentrate his army and entrench himself on the 
heights of Fredericksburg, and the defeat of the Federal army, with 16,000 
killed and wounded, was the sequel of the blunder. The mistake of a single 
officer in choosing a road when executing the orders of General Meade in 
marching upon Mine Run, in all human probability, saved Lee from a most 
disastrous defeat, and compelled Meade to retire and close the campaign. 
Had his plans been executed he would have suddenly thrown his entire 
army between Lee's divided forces, fought them in detail and defeated them ; 
but the mistaken march of part of his army separated his own forces and 
enabled Lee to concentrate at Mine Run, where he was so strongly entrenched 
that his position was absolutely impregnable. Many such instances might be 
cited, and results no less momentous frequently depended upon the condition 
of the roads and bridges, or of the weather, for " moist weather at the front" 
meant indefinite delay in the movement of trains and utter uncertainty as to 
the time in which necessary movements could be executed. The most heroic 
strategy of the war was exhibited by General Grant, when he swung his army 
away from the Mississippi River around to Jackson, defeated General Johnson 
in several pitched battles, separated him finally from General Pemberton, and 
shut Pemberton up in Yicksburg for his memorable siege that ended in the 
surrender of Pemberton's army six weeks thereafter. Grant is the only 
General of the army who would have made that campaign, and he did it 
against the advice of his subordinate officers and even against the written protest 
of General Sherman. It was a most perilous venture, but it meant the surrender 
and early capture of Vicksburg if successful, and Grant made it a success by 
his indomitable courage and celerity of movement. How he moved may be 
understood when it is stated that he was himself entirely without personal 
baggage, and he was so swift in his marches and in his attacks upon the enemy 
that when Johnson was defeated in the first battle, he was never given time to 
concentrate for another. But for that heroic movement it is doubtful whether 
Vicksburg could have been captured at all, and it is reasonably certain that, if 
captured, it would have been months later and after fearful sacrifice of life. 

It was the deep-seated personal prejudice of Jefferson Davis that made 
Sherman's romantic march to the sea possible, in 1864. General Joseph E. 
Johnson was not in favor with the Confederate President. A short time before 



S HER MAX AT ATLANTA. 



335 



the capture of Atlanta, Davis appeared there in person, removed Johnson from 
command and substituted General Hood, who was a brave but unskillful 
General ; and in a public speech Davis gave notice that the Confederate army 
was to assume the aggressive. Hood speedily justified the prediction of Davis 




nil- CAPTURE Ot BOOTH, llll SLAYER OF LINCOLN. 



by making a desperate assault upon Sherman's lines to raise the siege of Atlanta. 
It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the war, and for an hour or more after 
McPherson fell victory seemed to tremble in the balance, but Hood's army was 
finally defeated after terrible slaughter, and so impaired in strength that 
Sherman was soon able to manoeuvre him out of Atlanta without another great 



iy3 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

battle. Had General Johnson remained in command at Atlanta, it is entirely safe 
to say that General Sherman never would have attempted his march to the sea. 

Stonewall Jackson made the most heroic and perilous movement at Chancel- 
lorsville ever made by the Confederate army. He divided Lee's forces in the face 
of an enemy overwhelmingly superior in numbers, made a long march to strike 
General Hooker's right, surprised it, routed it and compelled Hooker's retreat 
back across the Rapidan without the two great armies meeting face to face in a 
general engagement. That movement cost Jackson his life and the Confederate 
army, confessedly, its ablest Lieutenant. Had Jackson opened the battle of 
Gettysburg there would have been no battle fought on Cemetery Hill. He 
would have possessed the strong positions on both flanks of that line, and the 
battle on the second day would not have been delayed until after mid-day. 
That delay enabled Meade largely to increase his army by the arrival of fresh 
corps and to make his position impregnable by fortification. It was the absence 
of the special qualities possessed by Jackson that lost Lee more than an even 
chance for winning that desperate and decisive conflict. There was but one 
General in the Union army who could have captured Lee at Appomattox. It 
was General Sheridan, and Sheridan alone, who made Lee's escape impossible. 
He was the very fiend of battle, capable of greater endurance than any other 
officer in the field, and inspired as he was by the hope of making Lee captive, he 
neither slept nor rested after the battle of Five Forks until the end came at 
Appomattox. Lee would have been defeated and routed without Sheridan, but 
he is the only General who would have forced Lee to surrender in an open 
country. 

The general public has almost forgotten the latest attempt of a European 
government to gain a foothold in North America. The brief reign of Maxi- 
milian as Emperor of Mexico ; his base desertion by the Emperor of the 
French when it became evident that the United States was to survive the 
rebellion as a united and powerful nation, and that the continued presence of 
a European army on American soil was regarded by the great Republic as a 
demonstration of hostility, and resented as such ; the immediate collapse of the 
empire when foreign support was withdrawn and the tragic death of Maximilian, 
form one of the saddest, but one of the most instructive, chapters in American 
history. 

Such are some of the forgotten lessons of the war, and if all of them were 
carefully studied and faithfully presented, they would fill a large volume of most 
interesting history ; but the actors in that crimson drama are rapidly passing 
away. Not one of the great chieftains of either the blue or the gray now 
survives, and each year sadly thins the already narrow circle of those who 
can recall the many forgotten lessons which are so romantically or so tragically 
interwoven with the history of the most heroic conflict ever made in man's 



338 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

struggle for man. It is well to believe that some of its lessons will never be 
forgotten. The horror of war which so hindered the prompt suppression of the 
Rebellion grew deeper and took firmer hold upon the minds of our people. To 
those communities, North and South, which sent out their best and bravest to 
unknown graves on distant battle-fields ; to those families who waited with fear 
and trembling to know at what cost to them was purchased the last great 
victory ; to those who saw their loved ones painfully hobbling upon crutches, 
or carrying an empty sleeve, or returning, the shadow of their former selves, 
from the horror of Andersonville or Libby Prison ; to these, and they were our 
whole people, war was, and is, utterly horrible. 

It is well to remember how the great man whose election to the presidency 
precipitated the conflict in those four years of supreme trial, of sadness and of 
victory, bound to him the hearts of the people ; and it is well to remember how, 
even in that terrible time when Lincoln was assassinated, and when his slayer 
was being pursued and captured, in the hour which might seem to invite 
anarchy, our national administration was equal to every emergency, and the 
government was undisturbed. That a government of the people can live 
through such catastrophes is a lesson not soon to be forgotten. The great 
lesson of the war is the permanency, the adaptability and the adequacy of 
republican institutions. 

A. K. McClure. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

OUR FLAG AT SEA. 



Sh HE origin of the American navy dates from the commencement 

-*"^.^ °f tne struggle f° r national independence. Up to that time the 
j| JK*%*' colonies had looked to the mother country for protection on the 
seas. So the outbreak of the Revolution found them entirely 



IB 

JJf- without a navy. Their maritime interests were great, and their 
tf\ fishing craft and merchant vessels were numerous and were 
..J/ manned by singularly able and daring mariners. But fighting 
ships they had none, while their opponent was not only the 
greatest naval power of the world, but was doubtless, at sea, stronger than all 
others put together. England was therefore able not only to command the 
American coasts with her fieet, but also largely to thwart whatever feeble efforts 
toward the construction of a navy were made by the haggling and incompetent 
Continental Congress. Nevertheless the American navy did then come into 
existence, and wrought at least one deed as immortal in the history of the sea, 
as Bunker Hill in that of the war upon the land. 

In the fall of 1775, the building of thirteen war-cruisers was begun ; but 
only six of them ever got to sea. Only one ship-of-the-line was built, the 
"America," and she was given to France before she was launched. During the 
whole war, a total of twenty small frigates and twenty-one sloops flew the 
American flag ; and fifteen of the former and ten of the latter were either 
captured or destroyed. What cockle-shells they were, and how slight in 
armament, compared with the floating fortresses of to-day, may be reckoned from 
the fact that twelve-pounders were their heaviest guns. Beside these, of course, 
there were many privateers, sent out to prey upon the enemy's commerce. 
These swift fishing craft ventured even to cruise along the very coast of 
England, and down to the time of the French alliance captured more than six 
hundred English vessels. 

In the annals of the regular navy, there are but three great captains' names : 
Wickes, Conyngham, and Jones. It was Lambert Wickes who, on his little 
sixteen gun " Reprisal," first bore the American war-flag to the shores of Europe, 

359 



34Q THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and made it a terror to the great power that claimed to "rule the waves." 
After a brilliant cruise the " Reprisal " went down, with all hands, in the summer 
of 1777, on the treacherous banks of Newfoundland. Then Gustavus Conyngham 
took up the work, with his " Surprise " and "Revenge," and that very summer 
so scourged the might of England in the North Sea and in the British Channel 
itself, that the ports were crowded with ships that dared not venture out, and 
the rates of marine insurance rose to fabulous figures. 

But the one splendid name of that era was that of a canny young Scotch- 
man, John Paul Jones. Eighteenth he stood on the list of captains commissioned 
by the Congress, but on the scroll of fame, for those times, first — and there is no 
second. Coming to Virginia in boyhood, he entered the mercantile marine. 
When the war broke out he offered his services to the Congress, and was made 
a captain. And in 1778 he was sent with the "Ranger," of eighteen guns, to 
follow where Wickes and Conyngham had led. He swept with his tiny craft up 
and down the Irish Channel, entered Whitehaven and burned the shipping at 
the docks ; captured off Carrickfergus the British war-sloop " Drake," larger 
than his own ship, and then made his way to Brest with all his prizes in tow. 

Next year he set out on his immortal cruise, with a squadron of five ships. 
His flagship was an old merchantman, the "Duras," fitted up for fighting and 
renamed the "Bon Homme Richard," in honor of Franklin and his "Poor 
Richard's Almanac." She was a clumsy affair, armed with thirty-two twelve- 
pounders and six old eighteen-pounders not fit for use, and manned by 380 men 
of every race, from New Englanders to Malays. The "Pallas" was also a 
merchantman transformed into a thirty-two gun frigate. The " Vengeance " and 
the "Cerf" were much smaller; quite insignificant. The "Alliance" was a 
new ship, built in Massachusetts for the navy, but unhappily commanded by a 
Frenchman named Landais, half fool, half knave. Indeed, all the vessels save 
the flagship were commanded by Frenchmen, who were openly insubordinate, 
refusing half the time to recognize the commodore's authority, and often leaving 
him to cruise and fight alone. Yet the motley squadron did much execution 
along the shores of Britain. It all but captured the city of Leith, and entered 
H umber and destroyed much shipping. 

But the crowning glory came on September 23, 1779. On that immortal 
date Jones espied, off Flamborough Head, a fleet of forty British merchantmen, 
guarded by two frigates, bound for the Baltic. At once he gave chase. He 
had, besides his own ship, only the " Pallas " and the " Alliance," but they would 
be sufficient to capture the whole fleet. But the miserable Landais refused to 
obey the signal, and kept out of the action. So the fight began, two and two. 
Jones, with the " Bon Homme Richard," attacked the "Serapis," Captain Pear- 
son, and the " Pallas" engaged the " Countess of Scarborough." The "Sera- 
pis " had fifty guns and was much faster and stronger than Jones's ship. The 



JOHN PAUL JONES AND HIS FAMOUS VICTORY, 



34i 



" Countess of Scarborough," on the other hand, was much inferior to the 
" Pallas " and proved an early victim. 

It was growing dark, on a cloudy evening, and the sea was smooth as a 
mill-pond, when the "Bon Homme Richard" and the " Serapis " began their 
awful duel. Both fired full broadsides at the same instant. Two of Jones's old 
eighteen-pounders burst, killing twelve men, and the others were at once aban- 
doned. So all through the fight, after that first volley, he had only his thirty-two 
twelve-pounders against the 
fifty guns — twenty of them 
eighteen-pounders, twenty 
nine-pounders, and ten six- 
pounders — of the "Serapis." 
For an hour they fought and 
manoeuvred, then came to- 
gether with a crash. An 
instant, the firing ceased. 
" Have you struck your 
colors?" demanded Pearson. 
" I have not yet begun to 
fight ! " replied Jones. Then 
with his own hands Jones 
lashed the two ships together, 
and inseparably joined, their 
sides actually touching, they 
battled on. Solid shot and 
canister swept through both 
ships like hail, while musket- 
men on the decks and in the 
rigging exchanged storms of 
bullets. For an hour and a 
half the conflict raged. Then 
Landais came up with the 

1 PAUL JONES. 

"Alliance" and began firing 

equally on both. Jones ordered him to go to the other side of the " Serapis " 
and board, and his answer was to turn helm and go out of the fight altogether. 
Now the fighting ships were both afire, and both leaking and sinking. Most 
of the guns were disabled, and three-fourths of the men were killed or 
wounded. The gallant Pearson stood almost alone on the deck of the doomed 
"Serapis," not one of his men able to fight longer. Jones was as solitary on 
the "Bon Homme Richard," all his men still able-bodied being at the pumps, 
striving to keep the ship afloat. With his own hands he trained a gun upon 




34 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the mainmast of the "Serapis," and cut it down; and then Pearson surren- 
dered. The "Pallas" and "Alliance" came up and took off the men, and in 
a few hours the two ships sank, still bound together in the clasp of death. 

This was not only one of the most desperate and deadly naval battles 
in history. Its moral effect was epoch-making. John Paul Jones was the 
hero of the day, and Europe showered honors upon him. The American flag 
was hailed as a rival to that of England on the seas, and all Europe was 
encouraged to unite against England and force her to abate her arrogant pre- 
tensions, and to accede to a more just and liberal code of international maritime 
law than had before prevailed. In view of this latter fact, this battle must be 
ranked among the three or four most important in the naval history of the 
world. It was this battle that inspired Catharine of Russia to enunciate the 
doctrine of the rights of neutrals in maritime affairs ; and the tardy acquiescence 
of England, eighty years later, in that now universal principle, was brought 
about by the blow struck by John Paul Jones off Flamborough Head. 

There were no other naval operations of importance during the Revolution, 
save those of the French fleet at Yorktown. But soon after the declaration of 
peace, new complications arose, threatening a war at sea. England and France 
were fighting each other, and commerce was therefore diverted to the shipping 
of other nations. A very large share of Europe's carrying trade was done by 
American vessels. But these were between two fires. England insisted that 
she had a right to stop and search American ships and take from them all 
sailors of English birth ; actually taking whom she pleased ; and France made 
free to seize any American ships she pleased, under the pretext that there were 
English goods aboard ; and when she. captured an English ship and found on 
board an American seaman who had been impressed, instead of treating him 
as a prisoner of war, like the others, she hanged him as a pirate. 

Naturally indignation rose high, and preparations were made for war with 
France. In July, i 798, the three famous frigates, the "Constellation," the "United 
States," and the "Constitution," best known as "Old Ironsides," were sent to sea, 
and Congress authorized the navy to be increased to include six frigates, twelve 
sloops, and six smaller craft. Among the officers commissioned, were the illus- 
trious Bainbridge, Mull, Decatur, Rodgers, and Stewart. Actual hostilities soon 
began. French piratical cruisers were captured, and an American squadron 
sailed for the West Indies to deal with the French privateers that abounded 
there, in which work it was generally successful. In January, 1799. Congress 
voted a million dollars, for building six ships of the line and six sloops. Soon 
after, on February 9, occurred the first engagement between vessels of the 
American and French navies. The " Constellation," Captain Truxton, over- 
hauled " L'Insurgente," at St. Kitts, in the West Indies, and after a fight of an 
hour and a quarter forced her to surrender. The " Constellation " had three 



SUPPRESSING THE BARBARY PIRATES. 343 

men killed and one wounded; " L'Insurgente " twenty killed and forty-six 
wounded. 

Again, on February 1, 1S00, Truxton with the " Constellation " came up, at 
Guadeloupe, with the French Frigate " La Vengeance." After chasing her two 
days he brought on an action. The two ships fought all night. In the 
morning, "La Vengeance," completely silenced and shattered, drew away and 
escaped to Curacoa, where she was condemned as unfit for further service. 
The " Constellation " was little injured save in her rigging. For his gallantry, 
Truxton received a gold medal from Congress. Later in that year there 
were some minor engagements, in which Americans were successful. 

By the spring of 1S01, friendly relations with France were restored. The 
President was accordingly authorized to dispose of all the navy, save thirteen 
ships, six of which were to be kept constantly in commission, and to dismiss 
from the service all. officers save nine captains, thirty-six lieutenants, and one 
hundred and fifty midshipmen. At about this time ground was purchased and 
navy-yards established at Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Wash- 
ington and Norfolk, and half a million dollars was appropriated for the 
completion of six seventy-four gun ships. 

Now came on real war. For many years the pirate ships of the Barbary 
States, Algeria and Tripoli, had been the scourge of the Mediterranean. The 
commerce of every land had suffered. Furopean powers did not venture to 
suppress the evil, but some of them basely purchased immunity by paying 
tribute to the pirates. America, too, at first followed this humiliating course, 
actually thus paying millions of dollars. In September, 1800, Captain Bainbridge 
went with the frigate " George Washington " to bear to the Dey of Algeria the 
annual tribute. The Dey took the money,' and then impressed Bainbridge and 
his ship into his own service for a time, to go on an errand to Constantinople. 
Bainbridge reported this to Congress, adding, "I hope I shall never again be 
sent with tribute, unless to deliver it from the mouth of our cannon." However, 
Bainbridge was received courteously at Constantinople, and his ship was the 
first to display the American flag there. 

Captain Dale was sent with a squadron to the Mediterranean in iSoi, to 
repress the pirates of Tripoli. One of his ships, the schooner "Experiment," 
captured a Tripolitan cruiser, and this checked for a time the ardor of the pirates. 
But open war was soon declared between the two countries, and Congress 
authorized the sending of a larger fleet to the Mediterranean. The gallant 
Truxton was offered the command of it, but declined because the cheese-paring 
Administration was too parsimonious to allow him a proper staff of subordinates. 
Thereupon he was dismissed from the service, and Captain Morris sent in his 
place. But false economy had so enfeebled the navy that the fleet was able to 
do little. One Tripolitan ship was captured, however, and another destroyed. 



344 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Then the Government woke up, and began building- new ships, and sent 
another rquadron over, led by Preble with the "Constitution." He went first 
to Morocco, whose Sultan at once sued for peace ; and then proceeded to 
Tripoli. Here he found that the frigate "Philadelphia," with Bainbridge and 
three hundred men aboard, had been captured and was being refitted by the 
Tripolitans for their own use. Decatur, commanding the " Enterprise," under 
Preble, determined upon a bold counter-stroke. Taking a small vessel, the 
"Intrepid," which he had captured from Tripoli, he sailed boldly into the 
harbor, Hying the Tripolitan flag and pretending to be a merchant of that 
country. Running alongside the " Philadelphia," he boarded her, set her afire, 
and sailed away in safety, though amid a storm of shot and shell. The " Phila- 
delphia " was burned to the water's edge. 

Nothing more was done at the time, however, save to keep up a blockade, 
and Bainbridge and his men remained in captivity. In August, 1804, Preble and 
Decatur made a vigorous attack upon the harbor, and destroyed two and 
captured three vessels. A few days later other attacks were made. Then a 
new squadron under Commodore Barron came to the scene, and Preble was 
superseded. No other naval operations of importance occurred, and peace was 
finally concluded in 1805. 

Troubles with England now grew niore serious. That country persisted in 
searching American ships and taking from them all whom she chose to call 
deserters from the British service. And so the two powers drifted into the war 
of 181 2. In that struggle, the Americans were badly worsted on land, but won 
victories of the first magnitude on the lakes and ocean. America had only 
nine frigates and a score of smaller craft, while England had a hundred ships of 
the line. Yet the honors of the war on the sea rested with the former. Her 
triumphs startled the world. The destruction of the " Guerriere " by the 
"Constitution," Captain Hull, marked an epoch in naval history. Then the 
"United States," Captain Decatur, vanquished the "Macedonian;" the 
"Wasp," Captain Jones, the "Frolic;" the " Constitution," Captain Bainbridge, 
the "Java;" and the " Hornet " the "Peacock." On Lake Erie, Commodore 
Perry won a great victory, which he announced in the famous message, " We 
have met the enemy, and they are ours." Equally brilliant was the victory of 
MacDonough on Lake Champlain. The most deplorable reverse was the 
destruction of the "Chesapeake" by the British ship " Shannon," the "Chesa- 
peake's" commander, Lawrence, losing his life, but winning fame through his 
tlving words, " I ><>n't give up the ship !" 

The conflicts of this war are more fully detailed elsewhere in this volume. 
It is needful here only to mention them briefly, as we have done. The cause of 
the surprising successes of the Americans may well be explained, however. 
It was due to that very inventive ingenuity that has made the history of the 




'|V ; 



34 6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

world's industrial progress so largely a mere chronicle of "Yankee notions." 
The Americans had invented and were using sights on their cannon. That was 
all. But the result was that their aim was far more accurate and their fire far 
more effective than that of their opponents. This advantage, added to courage 
and skill in seamanship equal to any the world had known, gave them their 
victory. 

This war was ended in February, 1S15, and a month later another was 
begun. This was against the Dey of Algeria, who had broken the peace and 
seized an American ship, despite the fact that America had continued down to 
this time to pay tribute to him. It was now determined to make an end of the 
business ; so Bainbridge was sent, as he had requested, to deliver the final 
tribute from his cannons' mouths. Before he got there, however, Decatur, did 
the work. He captured an Algerine vessel ; sailed into port and dictated an 
honorable peace ; and then imposed like terms on Tripoli and Tunis, thus 
ending the tyranny of the Barbary States over the commerce of the world. 

Thereafter for many years the navy had not much to do. Some vessels were 
used for purposes of exploration and research, and much was thereby added to 
the scientific knowledge of the world. During the Mexican war, naval opera- 
tions were unimportant. But in 1846 complications with Japan were begun. 
In that year two ships were sent to the Island empire, on an errand of peaceful 
negotiation, which proved fruitless. Three years later another went, on a 
sterner errand, and rescued at the cannon's mouth a number of shipwrecked 
American sailors who had been thrown into captivity. 

Finally the task of "opening Japan" to intercourse with the rest of the 
world, a task no other power had ventured to assume, was undertaken by 
America. On November 24, 1852, Commodore Perry set sail thither, with a 
powerful fleet. His commission was to " open Japan"; by peaceful diplomacy 
if he could, by force of arms if he must. The simple show of force was 
sufficient, and in 1854, he returned in triumph, bearing a treaty with Japan. 

The most extended and important services of the United States navy were 
performed during the War of the Rebellion At the outbreak of that conflict, 
in 1 86 1, the whole navy comprised only forty-two vessels in commission. 
Nearly all of these were scattered in distant parts of the world, where they had 
been purposely sent by the conspirators at Washington. Most of those that 
remained were destroyed in port, so that there was actually for a time only one 
serviceable war-ship on the North Atlantic coast. But building and purchase 
soon increased the navy, so that before the end of the year it numbered two 
hundred and sixty-four, and was able to blockade all the ports of the Southern 
Confederacy. They were a motley set, vessels of every imaginable type, ferry- 
boats and freight steamers, even, being pressed into use ; but they served. 

The first important naval action was that at Hatteras Inlet, in August, 1861. 



PASSING THE FORTS. 347 

There Commodore Stringham, with a fleet of steam and sailing craft, bombarded 
a series of powerful forts and forced them to surrender, without the loss of a single 
man aboard the ships. Next came the storming of Port Royal. At the end of- 
October Commodore Dupont and Commander Rodgers went thither with a 
strong squadron. They entered the harbor, and formed with their ships an 
ellipse, which kept constantly revolving, opposite the forts, and constantly pouring 
in a murderous fire. It was earthworks on land against old-fashioned wooden 
ships on the water ; but the ships won, and the forts surrendered. A small 
flotilla of rebel gunboats came to the assistance of the forts, but were quickly 
repulsed by the heavy fire from the ships. 

The next year saw much naval activity in many quarters. The blockade 
of all Southern ports was rigorously maintained, and there were some exciting 
engagements between the national ships and blockade runners. On the 
Cumberland, Ohio, Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers the gunboats of Foote 
and Porter greatly aided the land forces, in the campaigns against Fort Henry 
and Fort Donelson, at Island No. 10, and Vicksburg. Roanoke Island and 
New Berne, on the Carolina coast, were taken by a combined naval and military 
expedition. 

One of the most striking events of the war was the entrance of the Mississippi 
and capture of New Orleans by Admiral Farragut. He had a fleet of forty 
vessels, all told. Opposed to him were two great and strong land forts, Jackson 
and St. Philip, one on each side of the river, mounting two hundred and twenty- 
five guns. From one to the other stretched a ponderous iron chain, completely 
barring the passage, and beyond this was a fleet of iron-clad gun-boats, fire- 
ships, etc. Military and naval authorities scouted the idea that Farragut's 
wooden ships could ever fight their way through. But Farragut quietly scouted 
the authorities. Making his way up to within range of the forts he began a 
bombardment. On the first day his guns threw 2000 shells at the enemy. 
A huge fire-raft was sent against him, but his ships avoided it and it passed 
harmlessly by. Another was sent down that night, a floating mountain of flame. 
But one of Farragut's captains deliberately ran his ship into it, turned a hose 
upon it, and towed it out of the way ! 

For a week the tremendous bombardment was kept up, 16,800 shells being 
thrown at the forts. Then Farragut cut the chain, and started to run the fiery 
gauntlet of the forts with his fleet. Before daylight one morning the mortar- 
boats opened a furious fire, under cover of which the ships steamed straight up 
the river. The forts opened on them with every gun, a perfect storm of shot 
and shell, and the ships replied with full broadsides. Five hundred cannon 
were thundering. One ship was disabled and dropped back. The rest swept 
on in a cloud of flame. Before they were past the forts, fire-ships came down 
upon them, and iron-clad gunboats attacked them. The "Varuna," Captain 



348 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Boggs, was surrounded by five rebel gunboats, and sank them all. As the last 
of them sank, a sixth, a huge iron-clad ram, came rushing upon the " Varuna." 
Boggs saw he could not escape it, so he turned the " Varuna " so as to receive 
the blow squarely amidships. The ram crushed her like an egg-shell, and in a 
few minutes she sank. But her fearful broadsides, at such close range, riddled 
the ram, and the two went down together. In an hour and a half, eleven rebel 
gunboats were sent to the bottom, and the fleet was past the forts. Next 




SINKING OK THE ALABAMA. 



morning Farragut raised the national flag above the captured city of New 
Orleans. 

This tremendous conflict was not, however, the most significant of that 
year. There was another which, in a single hour, revolutionized the art of 
naval warfare. When, at the outbreak of the war, the Norfolk Navy-yard had 
been destroyed to keep it from falling into rebel hands, one ship partially escaped 
the flames. This was the great frigate " Merrimac," probably the finest ship in 



THE "MONITOR" AND "MERRIMAC" 349 

the whole navy. The Confederates took her hull, which remained uninjured, 
and covered it completely with a sloping- roof of iron plates four inches thick, 
backed with heavy timbers, put a great iron ram at her bow, and fitted her with 
large guns and powerful engines. Then, to protect her further, she was coated 
thickly with tallow and plumbago. She was regarded as entirely invulnerable 
to cannon-shot, and her builders believed she would easily destroy all ships sent 
against her and place New York and all Northern seaports at the mercy of her 
guns. At the same time a curious little craft was built, hurriedly enough, in 
New York. It was designed by John Ericsson, and was called the " Monitor." 
It consisted of a hull nearly all submerged, its flat iron deck only a few inches 
above the water, and upon this a circular iron tower, which was turned round and 
round by machinery and which carried two large guns. Naval experts laughed 
at the "cheese-box on a plank," as they called it, and thought it unworthy of 
serious consideration. 

A REVOLUTION IN NAVAL WARFARE. 

At noon of Saturday, March 8, the mighty " Merrimac," a floating fortress 
of iron, came down the Elizabeth River to where the National fleet lay in 
Hampton Roads. The frigate "Congress" fired upon her, but she paid no 
attention to it, but moved on to the sloop-of-war " Cumberland," crushed her side 
in with a blow of her ram, riddled her with cannon-balls, and sent her to the 
bottom. The solid shot from the "Cumberland's" ten-inch guns glanced from 
the " Merrimac's " armor, harmless as so many peas. Then the monster turned 
back to the "Congress" and destroyed her. Next she attacked the frigate 
" Minnesota " and drove her aground, and then retired for the night, intending 
the next day to return, destroy the entire fleet, and proceed northward to 
bombard New York. 

That night the " Monitor " arrived. She had been hurriedly completed. 
She had come down from New York in a storm, and was leaking and her 
machinery was out of order. She was not in condition for service. But she 
was all that lay between the "Merrimac" and the boundless destruction at 
which she aimed. So she anchored at the side of the " Minnesota " and waited 
for daylight. It came, a beautiful Sunday morning ; and down came the huge 
" Merrimac" to continue her deadly work. Out steamed the tiny "Monitor" 
to meet her. The " Merrimac " sought to ignore her, and attacked the " Minne- 
sota." But the "Monitor" would not be ignored. Captain Worden ran her 
alongside the "Merrimac," so that they almost touched, and hurled his 1'60-lb. 
shot at the iron monster as rapidly as the two guns could be worked. 
Those shots, at that range, told, as all the broadsides of the frigates had not. 
The "Merrimac's" armor began to yield, while her own firing had no effect 
upon the " Monitor." It was seldom she could hit the little craft at all, and 
when she did the shots elanced off without harm. Five times she tried to 



350 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ram the " Monitor," but the latter eluded her. A sixth time she tried it, and 
the "Monitor" stood still and let her come on. The great iron beak that 
had crushed in the side of the "Cumberland " merely glanced on the "Moni- 
tor's" armor and glided upon her deck. The " Merrimac " was so lifted 
and tilted as to expose the unarmored part of her hull to the "Monitor's" 
deadly fire, while the "Monitor" quickly slid out from under her, uninjured. 
Then the " Merrimac " retreated up the river, and her career was ended. She 
was a mere wreck. But the " Monitor," though struck by twenty-two heavy 
shots, was practically uninjured. The only man hurt on the "Monitor" was 
the gallant Captain Worden. He was looking through the peep-hole when one 
of the " Merrimac's" last shots struck squarely just outside. He was stunned 
by the shock and half-blinded by splinters ; but his first words on regaining 
consciousness were, " Have we saved the ' Minnesota ' ? " 

The "Monitor" had saved the "Minnesota," and all the rest of the fleet, 
and probably many Northern cities. But, more than that, she had, in that grim 
duel, revolutionized naval warfare. In that hour England saw her great ships 
of the line condemned. The splendid frigates, with their tiers of guns, were 
thenceforth out of date and worthless. The "cheese-box on a plank" in a 
single day had vanquished all the navies of the world. 

The success of Farragut in passing the Mississippi forts led Dupont, in 
April, 1863, to attempt in like manner to enter Charleston harbor ; but in vain. 
The fire from the forts was too fierce, and his fleet was forced to fall back with 
heavy losses. But in August, 1864, Farragut repeated his former exploit at 
Mobile. Forming his ships in line of battle, he stood in the rigging of the 
" Hartford," glass in hand, and directed their movements. As Dupont had done 
at Port Royal, he swept round and round in a fiery ellipse. At a critical point in 
the battle the lookout reported, "Torpedoes ahead !" A cry arose to stop the ship. 
"Go ahead! Damn the torpedoes!" roared the great Admiral, and the ship 
went on. Then the huge iron ram "Tennessee" came forward, to crush them 
as the "Merrimac" had crushed the "Cumberland." But Farragut, with 
sublime audacity, turned the bow of his wooden ship upon her and ran her 
down. Thus the Mobile forts were silenced and the harbor cleared. Nor 
must the storming of Fort Fisher be forgotten. The first attack was made in 
December, 1864. Admiral Porter bombarded the place furiously, and then 
General Butler attempted to take it with land forces. He failed, and returned 
to Fortress Monroe, saying the place could not be taken. But Porter thought 
otherwise, and remained at his post with his fleet. General Terry then went 
down with an army. Porter renewed the bombardment, the fort was captured, 
and the last port of the Confederacy was closed. 

While the National navy was thus carrying all before it along the coast, 
the Confederates were active elsewhere. Their swift, armed cruisers, fitted out 



352 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

in English ports, scoured the seas and preyed upon American commerce every- 
where, until the American merchant flag was almost banished from the ocean. 
The most famous of all these cruisers was the "Alabama," commanded by 
Raphael Semmes. During her career she destroyed more than ten million 
dollars' worth of American shipping. For a long time her speed and the skill 
and daring of her commander kept her out of the hands of the American navy. 
But at last, in June, 1864, Captain Winslow, with the ship " Kearsarge," came 
up with her in the neutral harbor of Cherbourg, France. Determined to make 
an end of her, he waited, just outside the harbor, for her to come out. Semmes 
soon accepted the challenge, and the duel occurred on Sunday, June 19. The 
shore was crowded with spectators, and many yachts and other craft came out, 
bearing hundreds anxious to see the battle. The vessels were not far from 
equal in strength. But the "Kearsarge" had two huge eleven-inch pivot guns, 
that made awful havoc on the "Alabama." The "Alabama," on the other 
hand, had more guns than the "Kearsarge." But the famous cruiser's time 
had come. As the two ships slowly circled round and round, keeping up a 
constant fire, every shot from the " Kearsarge" seemed to find its mark, while 
those of the "Alabama" went wide. And soon the "Alabama" sank, leaving 
the "Kearsarge" scarcely injured. 

A volume might be filled with accounts of notable exploits of the navy 
which there is not room even to mention here. But one more must be named, 
so daring and so novel was it. In April, 1864, the great iron-clad ram, "Albe- 
marle," was completed by the Confederates and sent forth to drive the National 
vessels from the sounds and harbors of the North Carolina coast. She came 
down the Roanoke River and boldly attacked the fleet, destroying one ship at 
the first onset and damaging others, while showing herself almost invulnerable. 
It was feared that she would actually succeed in raising the blockade, and 
extraordinary efforts were made to destroy her, but without avail. 

At last the job was undertaken by a young officer, Lieutenant dishing, 
who had already distinguished himself by his daring. He took a small steam 
launch, manned by himself and fifteen others, armed with a howitzer, and 
carrying a large torpedo. The "Albemarle" was at her dock at Plymouth, 
some miles up the river, and both banks of the narrow stream were closely 
lined with pickets and batteries. On a dark, stormy night the launch steamed 
boldly up the river and got within a short distance of the "Albemarle" before 
it was seen by the pickets. Instantly the alarm was given, and a hail of bullets 
fell upon the launch, doing, however, little harm. Cushing headed straight for 
the huge iron-clad, shouting at the top of his voice, in bravado, "Get off the 
ram ! We're going to blow you up ! " Running the launch up till its bow 
touched the side of the "Albemarle," he thrust the torpedo, at the end of a 
pole, under the latter and fired it. The explosion wrecked the "Albemarle" 



NAVAL ARCHITECTURE REVOLUTIONIZED. 353 

and sank her. The launch was also wrecked, and the sixteen men took to the 
water and sought to escape by swimming. All were, however, captured by the 
Confederates, save four. Of these, two were drowned, and the other two — 
one of them being Gushing himself — reached the other shore and got safely 
back to the Meet. 

We have said that in the spring of 1861 there were only 42 vessels in com- 
mission in the navy. There were also 27 serviceable ships not in commission, 
and 2 1 unserviceable, or 90 in all. During the four years of the war there were 
built and added to the navy 125 unarmored and 68 armored vessels, most of the 
latter being of the " Monitor" type. A few figures regarding some of the en- 
gagements will give a vivid idea of the manner in which the ships fought. In 
the futile attack of the iron-clads on the forts in Charleston harbor, April 7, 1863, 
nine vessels took part, using 23 guns and firing 139 times, at from 500 to 2100 
yards range. They hit Fort Wagner twice, Fort Moultrie 12 times, and Fort 
Sumter 55 times, doing little damage. Against them the forts used yy guns, 
firing 2229 times, and hitting the vessels 520 times, but doing little damage 
except to one monitor, which was sunk. In the second bombardment of Fort 
Fisher 21,716 projectiles, solid shot and shell, were thrown by the fleet. 

But the most important thing achieved was the entire transformation effected 
in naval science. Hitherto the war-ship had been simply an armed merchant- 
ship, propelled by sails or, latterly, by steam, carrying a large number of small 
guns. American inventiveness made it, after the duel of the "Monitor" and 
" Merrimac," a floating fortress of iron or steel, carrying a few enormously heavy 
guns. The glory of the old line-of-battle ship, with three or four tiers of guns 
on each side and a big cloud of canvas overhead, firing- rattling broadsides, and 
manoeuvring to get and hold the weather-gauge of the enemy — all that was 
relegated to the past forever. In its place came the engine of war, with little 
pomp and circumstance, but with all the resources of science shut within its ugly, 
black iron hull. 

John Paul Jones, with his " Bon Homme Richard," struck the blow that 
made universal the law of neutrals' rights. Hull, with the "Constitution," send- 
ing a British frigate to the bottom, showed what Yankee ingenuity in sighting 
guns could do. Ericsson and Worden, with the " Monitor," sent wooden navies 
to the hulk-yard and ushered in the era of iron and steel fighting-engines. 
These are the three great naval events of a century. 

One of the most thrilling events in naval history occurred in a time of 
peace. It was in the harbor of Apia, Samoa, in March, 1889. A j^reat storm 
struck the shipping and destroyed nearly every vessel there. Three German 
war-ships were wrecked. One English war-ship, by herculean efforts, was 
saved. Two American war-ships were wrecked, and one was saved after being 
run on the beach. This was the " Nipsic." The wrecked vessels were the 



354 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



"Trenton " and the " Vandalia." The combined strength of their engines and 
anchors was not enough to keep them from being driven upon the fateful reefs. 
The "Vandalia" was already stranded and pounding to pieces, and the 
"Trenton" was drifting down upon her. "Suddenly," says a witness of the 
scene, "the Stars and Stripes were seen flying from the gaff of the 'Trenton.' 
Previous to this no vessel in the harbor had raised a flag, as the storm was 
raging so furiously at sunrise that that ceremony was neglected. -It seemed now 
as if the gallant ship knew she was doomed, and had determined to go down 
with the flag of her country floating above the storm. Presently the last faint 
ray of daylight faded away, and night came down upon the awful scene. The 
storm was still raging with as much fury as at any time during the day. The 
poor creatures who had been clinging for hours to the rigging of the ' Vandalia ' 
were bruised and bleeding, but they held on with the desperation of men who 
hang by a thread between life and death. The ropes had cut the flesh of their 
arms and legs, and their eyes were blinded by the salt spray which swept over 
them. Weak and exhausted as they were, they would be unable to stand the 
terrible strain much longer. They looked down upon the angry water below 
them, and knew that they had no strength left to battle with the waves. Their 
final hour seemed to be upon them. The great black hull of the ' Trenton ' 
could be seen through the darkness, almost ready to crush into the stranded 
' Vandalia ' and grind her to atoms. Suddenly a shout was borne across the 
waters. The 'Trenton' was cheering the ' Vandalia.' The sound of 450 
voices broke upon the air and was heard above the roar of the tempest. ' Three 
cheers for the " Vandalia ! " ' was the cry that warmed the hearts of the dying 
men in the rigging. The shout died away upon the storm, and there arose from 
the quivering masts of the sunken ship a response so feeble that it was scarcely 
heard on shore. The men who felt that they were looking death in the face 
aroused themselves to the effort and united in a faint cheer to the flagship. 
Those who were standing on shore listened in silence, for that feeble cry was 
the saddest they had ever heard. Every heart was melted to pity. ' God help 
them ! ' was passed from one man to another. The sound of music next came 
across the water. The 'Trenton's' band was playing 'The Star Spangled 
Banner.' The thousand men on sea and shore had never before heard strains 
of music at such a time as this." And so the good ships went to wreck, and 
many a life was lost ; but a standard of endurance and of valor was there set up 
that shall command the reverence and wonder of the world as long as time shall 
endure. 

During fifteen years of peace, following the War of the Rebellion, the navy 
was much neglected. No new ships were built, and the old ones fell into decay. 
In 1 88 1, however, William H. Hunt, Secretary of the Navy, appointed an 
Advisory Board to plan the building of a new navy adequate to the needs of the 



' n >!i 'I I .' 
■VIP 




356 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

nation. From the deliberations of this Board and its successor, appointed 
by Secretary Chandler, sprang the splendid new fleet. The Board recom- 
mended the construction of four steel vessels : the "Chicago," of 4500 tons 
displacement; the "Boston" and "Atlanta," of 3189 tons displacement each, 
and the "Dolphin," of 1485 tons displacement. The dates of the acts author- 
izing these vessels were August 5, 1882, and March 3, 1883, and the contracts 
were taken for all four vessels by John Roach & Sons in July, 1883. 

The pioneer of the new steel navy was the " Dolphin." Although classed 
as a "dispatch boat" in the Navy Register, she has well earned the title of a 
first-class cruiser, and would be so classed if she had the tonnage displacement, 
since she made a most successful cruise around the world, traversing 52,000 
miles of sea without a single mishap. The " Dolphin " was launched April 21, 
and she was finished in November, 1884, and although no material changes 
were made in her she was kept in continuous service for nearly six years. 
After her trip around Cape Horn, and after ten months hard cruising, she was 
thoroughly surveyed, and there was not a plate displaced, nor a rivet loosened, 
nor a timber strained, nor a spar out of gear. At the end of her cruise around 
the world she was pronounced " the stanchest dispatch-boat in any navy of the 
world." 

The " Dolphin " is a single-screw vessel of the following dimensions : 
Length over all, 265^ feet; breadth of beam, 32 feet; mean draught, 14^ 
feet; displacement, 1485 tons. Her armament consists of two four-inch rapid- 
firing guns ; two six-pounder rapid-firing guns ; four forty-seven-millimeter 
Hotchkiss revolving cannon, and two Gatling guns. She is also fitted with 
torpedo tubes. Her cost, exclusive of her guns, was $315,000. Her comple- 
ment of crew consists of 10 officers and 98 enlisted men. 

The first four vessels were called the "A, B, C, and D of the New Navy," 
because of the first letters of their names — the " Atlanta," " Boston," " Chicago," 
and "Dolphin." The "Atlanta" and "Boston" are sister ships — that is, they 
were built from the same designs and their plates, etc., were moulded from the 
same patterns and they carry the same armament — hence a description of one 
is a description of the other. They followed the " Dolphin " in service, the 
" Atlanta " being launched on October 9, 1884, and the " Boston " on December 
4, 1884. The "Atlanta" cost $619,000 and the "Boston" $617,000. The 
official description of these vessels is that they "are central superstructure, 
single-deck, steel cruisers." Their dimensions are : Length over all, 283 feet ; 
breadth of beam, 42 feet; mean draught, 17 feet; displacement, 3189 tons; 
sail area, 10,400 square feet. The armament of each consists of two eight-inch 
' and six six-inch breech-loading rifles ; two six-pounder, two two-pounder, and two 
one-pounder rapid-firing guns ; two 47-millimeter and two 37-millimeter Hotch- 
kiss revolving cannon, two Gatling guns, and a set of torpedo-firing tubes. 



BUILDING A NEW NUT. 357 

Larger and finer still is the " Chicago," the flagship of the fleet, which was 
launched on December 5, 1885. She was the first vessel of the navy to have 
heavy guns mounted in half turrets, her four eight-inch cannon being carried on 
the spar-deck in half turrets built out from the ship's side, the guns being 
twenty-four and a-half feet above the water and together commanding the entire 
horizon. There are six six-inch guns in the broadside ports of the gun-deck 
and a six-inch gun on each bow. There are also two five-inch guns aft in the 
after portion of the cabin. Her secondary battery is two Gatlings, two six- 
pounders, two one-pounders, two 47-millimeter revolving cannon, and two 
37-millimeter revolving cannon. 

This auspicious start being made, the work of building the new navy went 
steadily on. Next came the protected cruisers "Baltimore," "Charleston," 
" Newark," " San Francisco," and " Philadelphia," big steel ships, costing from 
a million to nearly a million and a half dollars each. Much smaller cruisers, or 
gunboats, were the "Yorktown," "Concord," and "Bennington," and, smallest 
of all, the " Petrel." All these ships, though varying in size, are of the same 
general type. They are not heavily armored, and are not regarded as regular 
battle-ships, yet could doubtless give a good account of themselves in any 
conflict. They are chiefly intended, however, as auxiliaries to the real fighters, 
and as cruisers, commerce destroyers, etc. 

The "Vesuvius," launched in April, 18SS, is a "dynamite cruiser," a 
small, swift vessel, carrying three huge guns, each of fifteen inches bore, pointing 
directly forward and upward. From these, charges of dynamite are to be fired 
by compressed air. The " dishing " is a swift torpedo boat, with three tubes 
for discharging the deadly missiles. It was launched in 1 890, and named after 
the intrepid destroyer of the "Albemarle," whose feat has already been 
described. The "Stiletto" is a very small, wooden torpedo boat, of very 
great speed. 

The new navy also contains a number of vessels intended for coast-defense, 
heavily armored for hard fighting. The "Monterey" is a vessel of the 
"Monitor" type invented by Ericsson. It has two turrets, or barbettes, each 
carrying two twelve-inch guns, and protected by from eleven to thirteen inches 
of armor. The bow is provided with a ram. The " Puritan " is a vessel of 
similar design, with fourteen inches of armor. Besides the four big guns there 
is a secondary battery of twelve rapid-firing guns, four Hotchkiss revolving 
cannon, and four Catling guns. The " Miantonomah " is another double- 
turreted monitor. Her four ten-inch rifles have an effective range of thirteen 
miles, and she has a powerful secondary battery. Her big guns can send a five 
hundred-pound bolt of metal through twenty inches of armor, and she is herself 
heavily armored. This is a singularly powerful battle-ship, and would probably 



358 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

prove a match for any war-ship in the world. Several similar vessels are now 
under construction. 

The- " Maine " is a heavily-armored cruiser, and while intended for sea- 
going, is really a battle-ship. It has eleven inches of armor and carries four 
ten-inch rifles, besides numerous smaller guns. The "Texas" is a similar ship. 
The "Detroit," "Montgomery," and " Marblehead," not yet completed, are 
small, partially armored cruisers. The "New York" is a mighty armored 
cruiser, believed to surpass any other ship ever built in the combination of offen- 




' CHICAGO." U. S N., ONE OF THE NEW "WHITE SQUADRON" WAR SHIPS. 



sive and defensive power, coal endurance, and speed. She is 380 feet 6^ inches 
long; steams 20 knots per hour; can go 13,000 miles without coaling; has 
from six to eight inches of armor, and carries six eight-inch and twelve four-inch 
rifles, and numerous smaller guns. 

The "Raleigh " and " Cincinnati " are protected cruisers of medium size. 
There are several other cruisers, not yet named, especially designed as com- 
merce-destroyers, having great speed, and being made to look as much like 
merchant-ships as possible. Other gunboats and battle-ships are also being 
built ; one practice cruiser, intended for a school-ship, and a harbor-defense 



THE ADVANCE OF NAVAL SCIENCE. 359 

ram, carrying no guns, but provided with a particularly ugly beak at the bow. 
Altogether, the new navy, built or building, down to the present date comprises 
thirteen armored battle-ships, seventeen unarmored but "protected" cruisers, 
and six gunboats, all of them fully equal to any ships of their class in the 
world. 

In scarcely any department of human industry are the changes produced 
by the progress of civilization more strikingly seen than in the navy. When 
America was discovered, the galleon and the caravel were the standard war- 
ships of the world — clumsy wooden tubs, towering high in air, propelled by 
sails and even oars, with a large number of small cannons, and men armed 
with muskets and cross-bows. Such was the famed Armada, "that great Meet 
invincible," that was vanquished by the smaller, lighter crafts of Britain. Four 
hundred years have passed, and what is the war-ship of to-day? A low-lying 
hulk of iron and steel ; armed with a few big guns, one of which throws a 
heavier shot than a galleon's whole broadside ; driven resistlessly through the 
water by mighty steam engines ; lighted and steered by electric apparatus, and 
using an electric search-light that makes midnight as bright as day. All the 
triumphs of science and mechanic arts have contributed to the perfection of 
these dreadful sea monsters, a single one of which could have destroyed the 
whole Armada in an hour, and laughed to scorn the might of Nelson inTrafalgar 
Bay. What the locomotive is to the stage-coach, that is the " Miantonomah " 
or the " New York" to the " San Philip " or the " Revenue." 



SIP ' -'''!'>. >"'"„!. Mr "'~msm 





CHAPTER XIX. 

DIFFICULTIES WITH FOREIGN POWERS. 

'N a bright spring morning, the date, April 30, 1789, amid 

the booming of cannon, the plaudits of the multitude, and 

I the general rejoicing of the people of the whole country, 

Washington had been inaugurated President of the United 

States. That day saw one of the most significant events 

accomplished in the history of the world ; for there in the city 

of New York, where the inauguration took place, a nation was 

born in a day. The old Confederacy was gone : the new nation stood forth 

" like a giant ready to run a race." And what a race it has run since that time 

History has told. 

It would be strange indeed if the peace that then brooded over the country 
was to become unbroken, perpetual. No nation up to that time had made such 
a record, which might well be considered as heralding the Millennium ; and the 
United States was destined to prove no exception to the course marked out by 
all other empires since the government of the State had supplanted that of the 
tribe and clan. The fact is, the seeds of conflict were already sown and were 
destined to bear fruit, both in civil and foreign war. 

THE DIFFICULTY WITH [TIE BARBARV STATES. 

If the reader will look at any map of Africa he will see on the northern 
coast, defining the southern limits of the Mediterranean, four States, Morocco, 
Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, running east and west a distance of 1S00 miles. 
These powers had for centuries maintained a state of semi-independency by 
paying tribute to Turkey. But this did not suit Algeria, the strongest and 
most warlike of the North African States; and in the year 1710 the natives 
overthrew the rule of the Turkish Pasha, expelled him from the country, and 
united his office to that of the Dey. The Dey thus governed the country by 
means of a Divan or Council of State chosen from the principal civic function- 
aries. The Algerians, with the other " Barbary States," as the piratical States 
were called, defied the Powers of Europe. France alone successfully resisted 

361 



3G2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

these depredations, but only partially, for after she had repeatedly chastised the 
Algerians, the strongest of the northern piratical States, and had induced the 
Dey to sign a treaty of peace, they would bide their time, and after a time return 
to their bloody work. It was Algiers which was destined to force the United 
States to resort to arms in the defense of its persecuted countrymen ; the result 
is a matter of history. 

The truth is, this conflict was no less irrepressible than that greater conflict 
which a century later deluged the land in blood. For, before the Constitution 
had been adopted, two American vessels flying the flag of thirteen stripes and 
only thirteen stars, instead of the forty-four which now form our national con- 
stellation, while sailing the Mediterranean had fallen a prey to the swift, heavily 
armed Algerian cruisers. The vessels were confiscated and the crews, to the 
number of twenty-one persons, had been held for ransom, for which an enormous 
sum was demanded. 

This sum our Government had been unwilling to pay, as to do so would be to 
establish a precedent not only with Algeria, but with Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco 
as well, for each of these African piratical States was in league with the others, 
and all had to be separately conciliated. 

But, after all, what else could the Government do? The country had no 
navy. It could not undertake in improvised ships to go forth and fight the swift, 
heavily armed cruisers of the African pirates — States so strong that the 
commercial nations were glad to win exemption from their depredations by 
annual payments. Why not, then, ransom these American captives by the 
payment of money and construct a navy sufficiently strong to resist their en- 
croachments in the future ? This feeling on the part of the Government was 
shared by the people of the country, and so it was, Congress finally authorized 
the building of six frigates, and by another act empowered President Washing- 
ton to borrow a million of dollars for purchasing peace. Eventually the money 
was paid to all the four Powers, and it was hoped all difficulty was at an end. 
The work of constructing the new war-ships was pushed with expedition, and 
as will be seen, it was well that it was so. 

We are now brought to the year 1800. Tripoli, angry at not receiving as 
much money as was paid to Algiers, declared war against the United States ; 
but now circumstances had changed for the better. For our new navy, a small 
but most efficient one, was completed, and a squadron consisting of the frigates 
"Essex," Captain Rainbridge, the "Philadelphia," the "President," and the 
schooner " Experiment," was in Mediterranean waters. Two Tripolitan cruisers 
lying at Gibraltar on the watch for American vessels, were blockaded by the 
" Philadelphia." Cruising off Tripoli the " Experiment " fell in with a Tripolitan 
cruiser of fourteen guns, and after three hours' hard fighting captured her. The 
Tripolitans lost twenty killed and thirty wounded ; this brilliant result had a 
marked effect in quieting the turbulent pirates. 



A SPLENDID VICTORY. 



363 



But peace was not yet assured. In 181 5, while this country was at 
war with England, the Dey of Algiers unceremoniously dismissed the 
American Consul and declared war against the United States ; and all 
because he had not received the articles demanded under the tribute treaty. 
This time the Government was well prepared for the issue. The population 
of the country had increased to over eight millions. The military spirit 
of the nation had been aroused by the war with Great Britain, ending in the 
splendid victory at New Orleans under General Jackson. Besides this, the 
navy had been increased and made" far more effective. The Administration, 




A RAILROAH ItATTKKV. 



with Madison at its head, decided to submit to no further extortions from the 
Mediterranean pirates, and the President sent in a forcible message to Congress 
on the subject, taking high American ground. The result was a prompt 
acceptance of the Algerian declaration of war. Events succeeded each other in 
rapid succession. Ships new and old were at once fitted out. On May 1 5, 18 15, 
Decatur sailed from New York to the Mediterranean. His squadron comprised 
the frigates "Guerriere," "Macedonian," and "Constellation," the new sloop of 
war "Ontario," and four brigs and two schooners in addition. 

On June 1 7, the second day after entering the Mediterranean, Decatur 



364 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

captured the largest frigate in the Algerian navy, having forty-four guns. The 
next day an Algerian brig was taken, and in less than two weeks after his first 
capture Decatur, with his entire squadron, appeared off Algiers. The end had 
come ! The Dey's courage, like that of Bob Acres, oozed out at his fingers' 
ends. The terrified Dey sued for peace, which Decatur compelled him to sign 
on the quarter-deck of the " Guerriere." In this treaty it was agreed by the 
Dey to surrender all prisoners, pay a heavy indemnity, and renounce all tribute 
from America in the future. Decatur also secured indemnity from Tunis and 
Tripoli for American vessels captured under the guns of their forts by British 
cruisers during the late war. 

This ended at once and forever the payment of tribute to the piratical * 
States of North Africa. All Europe, as well as our own country, rang with the 
splendid achievements of our navy ; and surely the stars and stripes had never 
before floated more proudly from the mast-head of an American vessel, and they 
are flying as proudly to-day. 

KING BOMBA BROUGHT TO TERMS. 

It was seventeen years later, in 1832, under the administration of General 
Jackson, that one of the most interesting cases of difficulty with a foreign power 
arose. As with Algeria and Tripoli, so now, our navy was resorted to for the 
purpose of exacting reparation. This time the trouble was with Italy, or rather 
that part of Italy known at that time as the Kingdom of Naples, which had been 
wrested from Spain by Napoleon, who placed successively his brother Joseph 
and Murat, Prince, Marshal of France, and brother-in-law of Napoleon, on the 
throne of Naples and the two Sicilies. During the years 1809-12 the Neapolitan 
Government under Joseph and Murat successively had confiscated numerous 
American ships with their cargoes. The total amount of the American claims 
against Naples, as filed in the State Department, when Jackson's Administration 
assumed control, was $1,734,994. They were held by various insurance com- 
panies and by citizens, principally of Baltimore. Demands for the payment of 
these claims had from time to time been made by our Government, but Naples 
had always refused to settle them. 

Jackson and his Cabinet took a decided stand, and determined that the 
Neapolitan Government, then in the hands of Ferdinand II — subsequently nick- 
named Bomba because of his cruelties — should make due reparation for the 
losses sustained by American citizens. The Hon. John Nelson, of Frederick, 
Maryland, was appointed Minister to Naples and ordered to insist upon a 
settlement. Commodore Daniel Patterson,* who aided in the defense of New 

* Daniel T. Patterson was born on Long Island, New York, March 6, 1786; was appointed 
midshipman in the navy, 1800 ; was attached to the frigate "Philadelphia" when she ran upon a 
reef near Tripoli ; was captured and a prisoner until 1805 ; was made lieutenant in 1S07 and 



KING BO MB A BROUGHT TO TERMS. 



365 



Orleans in 181 5, was put in command of the Mediterranean squadron and 
ordered to cooperate with Minister Nelson in enforcing his demands. But 
Naples persisted in her refusal to render satisfaction, and a warlike demonstra- 
tion was decided upon, the whole matter being placed, under instructions, in the 
hands of Commodore Patterson. 

The entire force at his command consisted of three fifty-gun frigates and 
three twenty-gun corvettes. So as not to precipitate matters too hastily, the 
plan was for three vessels to appear in the Neapolitan waters, one at a time, and 




UNITED STATES MILITARY TELEGRAPH WAGON. 



instructions were given accordingly. The " Brandywine," with Minister Nelson 
on board, went first. Mr. Nelson repeated the demands for a settlement, and 
they were refused : there was nothing in the appearance of a Yankee envoy and 
a single ship to trouble King Bomba and his little kingdom. The " Brandy- 



master-commandant in 1813. In 1S14 he won great credit as commander of naval forces at New 
Orleans, and received the thanks of Congress. He commanded the flotilla which destroyed the fort 
and defenses of Lafitte, the pirate. He was made captain in 1S15 ; Navy Commissioner, 1828 to 
1832, and commanded the Mediterranean Squadron, 1S32-1S35. He died on August 15, 1839, 
being then in command of the Washington Navy Yard. 



366 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

wine" cast anchor in the harbor and the humbled Envoy waited patiently for a 
few days. Then another American flag- appeared on the horizon, and the frigate 
"United States" floated into the harbor and came to anchor. Mr. Nelson 
repeated his demands, and they were again refused. Four days slipped away, 
and the stars and stripes again appeared off the harbor. King Bomba, looking 
out from his palace windows, saw the fifty-gun frigate "Concord" sail into the 
harbor and drop her anchor. Then unmistakable signs of uneasiness began to 
show themselves. Forts were repaired, troops drilled, and more cannon mounted 
on the coast. The demands were reiterated, but the Neapolitan Government 
still refused. Two days later another war-ship made her way into the harbor. 
It was the "John Adams." When the fifth ship sailed gallantly in, the Bourbon 
Government seemed almost on the point of yielding ; but three days later Mr. 
Nelson sent word home that he was still unable to collect the bill. But the end 
was not yet. Three days later, and the sixth sail showed itself on the blue 
waters of the peerless bay. It was the handwriting on the wall for King Bomba, 
and his Government announced that they would accede to the American 
demands. The negotiations were promptly resumed and speedily closed, the 
payment of the principal in installments with interest being guaranteed. 
Pending negotiations, from August 28 to September 15 the entire squadron 
remained in the Bay of Naples, and then the ships sailed away and separated. 
So, happily and bloodlessly, ended a difficulty which at one time threatened most 
serious results. 

AUSTRIA AND THE KOSZTA CASE. 

Another demonstration, less imposing in numbers but quite as spirited, and, 
indeed, more intensely dramatic, occurred at Smyrna in 1853, when Captain Dun- 
can N. Ingraham, with a single sloop-of-war, trained his broadsides on a fleet of 
Austrian war-ships in the harbor. The episode was a most thrilling one, and 
"The Story of America " would indeed be incomplete were so dramatic an affair 
left unrecorded on its pages. And this is the record : — 

When the revolution of Hungary against Austria was put down, Kossuth, 
Koszta, and other leading revolutionists fled to Smyrna, and the Turkish Gov- 
ernment, after long negotiations, refused to give them up. Koszta soon after 
came to the United States, and in July, 1852, declared under oath his intention 
of becoming an American citizen. He resided in New York city a year 
and eleven months. 

The next year Koszta went to Smyrna on business, where he remained for 
a time undisturbed. He had so inflamed the Austrian Government against him, 
however, that a plot was formed to capture him. On June 21, 1853, while he 
was seated on the Marina, a public resort in Smyrna, a band of Greek mercen- 
aries, hired by the Austrian Consul, seized him and carried him off to an 
Austrian ship-of-war, the Huzzar, then lying in the harbor. On board the vessel 



CAPTAIN INGRAHAM. 



367 



Archduke John, brother of the 
Emperor, was said to be in 
command. Koszta was put 
in irons and treated as a 
criminal. The next clay an 
American sloop-of-war, the 
"St. Louis," commanded by 
Capt. Duncan N. Ingraham, :;: 
sailed into the harbor. Learn- 
ing what had happened, Capt. 
Ingraham immediately sent 
on board the "Huzzar" and 
courteously asked permission 
to see Koszta. His request 
was granted, and Captain 
Ingraham assured himself 
that Koszta was entitled to 
the protection of the Ameri- 
can Hag. He demanded 
Koszta's release of the Aus- 
trian commander. When it 
was refused he communi- 
cated with the nearest United 
States official, Consul Brown, 
at Constantinople. While he 
was waiting for an answer 
six Austrian war-ships sailed 

* Duncan Nathaniel Ingraham 
was born December 6, 1S02, at 
Charleston, South Carolina. He 
entered the United States Navy in 
1812 as midshipman, and became a 
captain September 14, 1855. In 
March, 1856, he was appointed Chief 
of the Bureau of Ordnance and 1 1 j 
drography of the Navy Department, 
a position which he held until South 
Carolina passed her ordinance of 
secession in i860. He then resigned 
his commission in the navy and took 
service under the Confederate States, 
in which he rose to the rank of 
Commodore. He died in 1891. 




3 68 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

into the harbor and came to anchor in positions' near the " Huzzar." On June 
29th, before Captain Ingraham had received any answer from the American 
Consul, he noticed unusual signs of activity on board the " Huzzar," and before 
long she began to get under way. The American Captain made up his mind 
immediately. He put the "St. Louis" straight in the " Huzzar's " course and 
cleared his guns for action. The "Huzzar" hove to, and Captain Ingraham 
went on board and demanded the meaning of the " Huzzar's " action. 

"We propose to sail for home," replied the Austrian. "The Consul has 
ordered us to take our prisoner to Austria." 

" You will pardon me," said Captain Ingraham, " but if you attempt to leave 
this port with that American on board I shall be compelled to resort to extreme 
measures." 

The Austrian glanced around at the fleet of Austrian war-ships and the 
single American sloop-of-war. Then he smiled pleasantly, and intimated that 
the " Huzzar" would do as she pleased. 

Captain Ingraham bowed and returned to the " St. Louis." He had no 
sooner reached her deck than he called out : " Clear the guns for action ! " 

The Archduke of Austria saw the batteries of the "St. Louis" turned on 
him, and he realized that he was in the wrong. The " Huzzar" was put about 
and sailed back to her old anchorage. Word was sent to Captain Ingraham 
that the Austrian would await the arrival of the note from Mr. Brown. 

The Consul's note, which came on July 1st, commended Captain Ingraham's 
course and advised him to take whatever action he thought the situation 
demanded. 

At eight o'clock on the morning of July 2d, Captain Ingraham sent a note 
to the commander of the " Huzzar," formally demanding the release of Mr. 
Koszta. Unless the prisoner was delivered on board the "St. Louis" before 
four o'clock the next afternoon, Captain Ingraham would take him from the 
Austrians by force. The Archduke sent back a formal refusal. At eight o'clock 
the next morning Captain Ingraham once more ordered the decks cleared for 
action and trained his batteries on the "Huzzar." The seven Austrian war- 
vessels cleared their decks and put their men at the guns. 

At ten o'clock an Austrian officer came to Captain Ingraham and began to 
temporize. Captain Ingraham refused to listen to him. 

"To avoid the worst," he said, " I will agree to let the man be delivered to 
the French Consul at Smyrna until you have opportunity to communicate with 
your Government. But he must be delivered there, or I will take him. I have 
stated the time." 

At twelve o'clock a boat left the " Huzzar" with Koszta in it, and an hour 
later the French Consul sent word that Koszta was in his keeping. Then 
several of the Austrian war-vessels sailed out of the harbor. Long negotiations 



AUSTRIA YIELDS. 



Imitted that 



between the two Governments followed, and in the end Austria 
the United States was in the right, and apologized. 

Scarcely had the plaudits which greeted Captain Ingraham's intrepid course 
died away, when, the next year, another occasion arose where our Government 
was obliged to resort to the force ol arms. This time Nicaragua was the country 
involved. Early in |une, 1854, alter repeated but unsuccessful attempts at a 
settlement had been made by the United States, our Government — Franklin 
Pierce was then President — determined to secure a settlement by appeal to 
arms. Various outrages, it was the contention of our Government, had been 
committed on the persons and property of American citizens dwelling in 
Nicaragua. The repeated demands for redress were not complied with. 



Commander Hollins, 
proceed to the town of 
coast of Nicaragua, and 



Peaceful negotiations having failed, in June, 1854, 
with the sloop-of-war " Cyane," was ordered to 
San Juan, or Greytown, which lies on the Mosquito 
to insist on favorable 
action from the Nica- 
raguan Government. 
Captain Hollins came 
to anchor off the coast 
and placed his de- 
mands before the 
authorities. He 
waited patiently for a 
response, but no satis- 
fa c t o r y one was 
offered him. After 
waiting in vain for a 
number of days he 
made a final appeal 
and then proceeded 

to carry out instructions. On the morning of July 13th he directed his batteries 
on the town of San Juan and opened fire. Until four o'clock in the afternoon 
the cannon poured out broadsides as fast as they could be loaded. By that time 
the greater part of the town had been destroyed. Then a party of marines 
was put on shore, and they completed the destruction of the place by burning 
the houses. 

A lieutenant of the British navy commanding a small vessel of war was in the 
harbor at the time. England claimed a species of protectorate over the settle- 
ment, and the British officer raised violent protest against the action taken by 
America's representative. Captain Hollins, however, paid no attention to the 
interference and carried out his instructions. The United States Government 
24 




LATEST MODEL OF GATLING 1 II LD GUN. 



370 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

later sustained Captain Hollins in everything that he did, and England thereupon 
thought best to let the matter drop. In this they were unquestionably wise. 

At this time the United States seems to have entered upon a period of 
international conflict. For no sooner had the difficulties with Austria and 
Nicaragua been adjusted, than another war-cloud appeared on the horizon. 
Here again but a year from the last conflict had elapsed, for in 1855 an offense 
was committed against the United States by Paraguay. We now have to go 
back three years. In 1S52 Captain Thomas J. Page,* commanding a small 
light-draught steamer, the "Water Witch," by direction of his Government 
started for South America to explore the river La Plata and its large tributaries, 
with a view to opening up commercial intercourse between the United States 
and the interior States of South America. We have said the expedition was 
ordered by our Government ; it also remains to be noted that the expedition 
was undertaken with the full consent and approbation of the countries having 
jurisdiction over those waters. Slowly, but surely, the little steamer pushed her 
way up the river, making soundings and charting the river as she proceeded. 
All went well until February 1, 1855, when the first sign of trouble appeared. 

It was a lovely day in early summer — the summer begins in February in 
that latitude — and nothing appeared to indicate the slightest disturbance. The 
little "Water Witch" was quietly steaming up the River Parana, which forms 
the northern boundary of the State of Corrientes, separating it from Paraguay, 
when suddenly, without a moment's warning, a battery from Fort Itaparu, on 
the Paraguayan shore, opened fire upon the little steamer, immediately killing 
one of her crew who at that time was at the wheel. The "Water Witch" was 
not fitted for hostilities ; least of all could it assume the risk of attempting to 
run the batteries of the fort. Accordingly, Captain Page put the steamer 
about, and was soon out of range. It should here be explained that at that 
time President Carlos A. Lopez was the autocratic ruler of Paraguay, and that 
he had previously received Captain Page with every assurance of friendship. 
A few months previous, however, Lopez had been antagonized by the United 
States Consul at Ascencion, who, in addition to his official position, acted as 
a^ent for an American mercantile company, of which Lopez disapproved and 
went so far as to break up the business of the company. He also issued a 
decree forbidding foreign vessels of war from navigating the Parana or any of 
the waters bounding Paraguay, which he clearly had no right to do, as half the 
stream belonged to the State bordering on the other side. 

* Thomas Jefferson Page was born in Virginia in 1815. He entered the navy as midshipman 
in October, 1827, and was promoted to a lieutenancy in June, 1833. In September, 1S55, he 
became a commander. In 1S61, his State having passed the ordinance of secession, he resigned 
from the United States Navy, joining that of the Confederate States, where he attained the rank of 
Commodore. 



THE PARAGUAYAN TROUBLE. 371 

Captain Page, finding it impracticable to prosecute his exploration any 
further, at once returned to the United States, giving the Washington authori- 
ties a detailed account of the occurrence. It was claimed by our Government that 
the "Water Witch" was not subject to the jurisdiction of Paraguay, as the 
channel was the equal property of the Argentine Republic. It was further 
claimed that even if she were within the jurisdiction of Paraguay she was not 
properly a vessel of war, but a Government boat employed for scientific pur- 
poses. And even were the vessel supposed to be a war vessel, it was contended 
that it was a gross violation of international right and courtesy to fire shot at 
the vessel of a friendly power without first resorting to more peaceful means. 
At that time William L. Marcy, one of the foremost statesmen of his day, was 
Secretary of State. Mr. Marcy at once wrote a strong letter to the Paraguayan 
Government, stating the facts of the case, declaring that the action of Paraguay in 




EIGHT-INCH GUN AND CARRIAGE OF THE "BALTIMORE." 
[Built at the Washington Navy-Yard, of American Steel.) 

firing upon the " Water Witch " would not be submitted to, and demanding ample 
apology and compensation. All efforts in this direction, however, proved fruit- 
less. Lopez refused to give any reparation ; and not only so, but declared no 
American vessel would be allowed to ascend the Parana for the purpose 
indicated. 

The event, as it became known, aroused not a little excitement ; and while 
there were some who "deprecated a resort to extreme measures" — a euphemistic 
phrase frequently resorted to by those who would neither resent an insult nor 
take umbrage at an intended offense — the general sentiment of the country was 
decidedly manifested in favor of an assertion of our rights in the premises. 
Accordingly, President Pierce sent a message to Congress stating that a peace- 
ful adjustment of the difficulty was impossible, and asking that he be authorized 
to send such a naval force to Paraguay as would compel her arbitrary ruler to 
give the full satisfaction demanded. 

To this request Congress promptly and almost unanimously gave assent, 
and one of the strongest naval expeditions ever fitted out by the United States up 



3J2 . THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to that time was ordered to assemble at the mouth of La Plata River. The 
fleet was a most imposing one and comprised nineteen vessels, seven of which 
were steamers specially chartered for the purpose, as our largest war vessels 
were of too deep draught to ascend La Plata and Parana. The entire squad- 
ron carried 200 guns and 2500 men, and was commanded by Flag Officer, 
afterward Rear Admiral, Shubrick,* one of the oldest officers of our navy, and 
one of the most gallant men that ever trod a quarter deck. Flag Officer Shu- 
brick was accompanied by United States Commissioner Bowlin, to whom was 
intrusted negotiations for the settlement of the difficulty. Three years and 
eleven months had now passed since the "Water Witch" was fired upon, and 
President Buchanan had succeeded Franklin Pierce. The winter of 1859 was 
just closing in at the North ; the streams were closed by ice, and the lakes were 
ice-bound, but the palm trees at the South were displaying their fresh green 
leaves, like so many fringed banners, in the warm tropical air when the United 
States squadron assembled at Montevideo [Montevideo]. As has been said, 
the force was an imposing one. There were two United States frigates, the 
"Sabine" and the "St. Lawrence;" two sloops-of-war, the "Falmouth" and 
the " Preble ; " three brigs, the " Bainbridge," the " Dolphin," and the " Perry ;" 
six steamers especially armed for the occasion, the " Memphis," the " Cale- 
donia," the "Atlanta," the "Southern Star," the " Westernport," the " M. W. 
Chapin," and the " Metacomet ; " two armed storeships, the " Supply" and the 
"Release;" the revenue steamer, "Harriet Lane;" and, lastly, the little 
"Water Witch" herself, no longer defenseless, but all in fighting trim for hos- 
tilities. 

On the 25th of January, 1859, within just one week of four years from the 
firing upon the "Water Witch," the squadron got under way and came to 
anchor off Ascencion, the capital of Paraguay. Meanwhile President Urquiza, 
of the Argentine Republic, who had offered his services to mediate the diffi- 
culty, had arrived at Ascencion in advance of the squadron. The negotiations 
were reopened, and Commissioner Bowlin made his demand for instant repara- 
tion. All this time Flag Officer Shubrick was not idle. With such of our 
vessels as were capable of ascending the river, taking them through the diffi- 
culties created by the currents, shoals, and sand bars of the river, he brought 

* William Branford Shubrick was one of the most illustrious men whose name has appeared on 
the roll of United States naval officers. He was born in 1790; appointed midshipman United 
States Navy June 20, 1806; joined the sloop-of-war "Wasp" 1812; a year later was transferred 
to the frigate "Constellation;" aided in the capture of the British vessels " Cvane " and 
" Levant ; " and in 1815 was awarded a sword by his native State. In 1S20 was made commander ; 
in 1829 commanded the "Lexington; " in 1846 commanded the Pacific squadron, and filled 
various prominent positions extending over a period of sixty-one years, till May 12, 1876, when 
he died. 



LOPEZ COMES TO TERMS. 



373 



them to a chosen position, where they made ready in case of necessity to open 
fire. The force within striking distance of Paraguay consisted of 1740 men, 
besides the officers, and 78 guns, including 23 nine-inch shell guns and one 
shell gun of eleven inches. 

Ships and guns proved to be very strong arguments with Lopez. It did 
not take the Dictator-President long to see that the United States meant business, 
and that the time for trifling had passed and the time for serious work had 
indeed begun. President Lopez's cerebral processes worked with remarkable and 
encouraging celerity. By February 5th, within less than two weeks of the 
starting of the squadron from Montevideo, Commissioner Bowlin's demands 
were all acceded to. Ample apologies were made for firing on the " Water 




ONE OF THE " MIANTONOMAH S FOUR TEN-INCH BREECH-LOADING RIFLES. 

Witch" and pecuniary compensation was given to the family of the sailor who 
had been killed. In addition to this, a new commercial treaty was made between 
the two countries, and cordial relations were fully restored between the two 
governments. When the squadron returned the Secretary of the Navy 
expressed the satisfaction of the government and the country in the follow- 
in<j terms : — 



"To the zeal, energy, discretion, and courteous and gallant bearing of Flag-officer Shubrick 
and the officers under his command, in conducting an expedition far into the interior of a remote 
country, encountering not only great physical difficulties, but the fears, apprehensions and prejudices 
of numerous States; and to the good conduct of the brave men under his command, is the country 
largely indebted, not only for the success of the enterprise, but for the friendly feeling towards the 
United States which now prevails in all that part of South America." 



374 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

To such a happy and peaceful conclusion were our difficulties with Paraguay 
finally brought. 

A period of thirty years elapsed before any serious difficulty occurred with 
any foreign powers. It was in 1891 that a serious difficulty threatened to 
disrupt our relations with Chili and possibly involve the United States in war 
with that power. Happily the matter reached a peaceful settlement. In 
January, 1891, civil war broke out in Chili, the cause of which was a contest 
between the legislative branch of the government and the executive, for the 
control of affairs. The President of Chili, General Balmaceda, began to assert 
authority which the legislature, or " the Congressionalists," as the opposing 
party was called, resisted as unconstitutional and oppressive, and they accord- 
ingly proceeded to interfere with Balmaceda's Cabinet in its efforts to carry out 
the despotic will of the executive. 

Finally matters came to a point where appeal to arms was necessary. On 
the gth of January the Congressional party took possession of the greater part 
of the Chilian fleet, the navy being in hearty sympathy with the Congression- 
alists, and the guns of the war-ships were turned against Balmaceda, Valparaiso, 
the capital, and other ports being blockaded by the ships. For a time Balma- 
ceda maintained control of the capital and the southern part of the country. 
The key to the position was Valparaiso, which was strongly fortified, Balma- 
ceda's army being massed there and placed at available points. 

At last the Congressionalists determined to attack Balmaceda at his capital, 
and on August 21st landed every available fighting man at their disposal at 
Concon, about ten miles north of Valparaiso. They were attacked by the Dic- 
tator on the 2 2d, there being twenty thousand men on each side. The Dictator 
had the worst of it. Then he rallied his shattered forces, and made his last 
stand at Placillo, close to Valparaiso, on the 28th. The battle'was hot, the car- 
nage fearful ; neither side asked or received quarter. The magazine rifles, 
with which the revolutionists were armed, did wonders. The odds were against 
Balmaceda ; both his generals quarreled in face of the enemy ; the army marched 
against the foe divided and demoralized. In the last battle both Balmaceda's 
generals were killed. The valor and the superior tactics of General Canto, leader 
of the Congressional army won the day. Balmaceda fled and eventually com- 
mitted suicide, and the Congressionalists entered the capital in triumph. 

Several incidents meantime had conspired, during the progress of this war, 
to rouse the animosity of the stronger party in Chili against the United States. 
Before the Congressionalists' triumph the steamship Itata, loaded with American 
arms and ammunition for Chili, sailed from San Francisco; and as this was a 
violation of the neutrality laws, a United States war vessel pursued her to the 
harbor of Iquique, where she surrendered. Then other troubles arose. Our 
minister at Valparaiso, Mr. Egan, was charged by the Congressionalists, now 



AMERICAN SEAMEN ATTACKED. 



375 



in power, with disregarding international law in allowing the American 
Legation to become an asylum for the adherents of Balmaceda. Subsequently 
these refugees were permitted to go aboard American vessels and sail away. 
Then Admiral Brown, of the United States squadron, was, in Chili's opinion, 
guilty of having acted as a spy upon the movements of the Congressionalists' 
fleet at Ouinteros, and of bringing intelligence of its movements to Bal- 
maceda at Valparaiso. This, however, the Admiral stoutly denied. 

AN ATTACK UPON AMERICAN SEAMEN. 

The strong popular feeling of dislike which was engendered by this news 
culminated on the 1 6th of October, in an attack upon American seamen by a 
mob in the streets of 
the Chilian capital. 
Captain Schley, com- ' 
mander of the United 
States cruiser, Balti- 
more, had given shore- 
leave to a hundred and 







pinnirairnmnnnnninrnn a: 



UNITED STATES I2-INIT1 IIKEEITI- I.i lAIUM i M"KTAK, 1.1K III lUTT /.I R . 



seventeen petty officers and seamen, some of whom, when they had been 
on shore for several hours, were set upon by Chilians. They took refuge in a 
street car, from which, however, they were soon driven and mercilessly beaten, 
and a subordinate officer named Riggen fell, apparently lifeless. The American 
sailors, according to Captain Schley's testimony, were sober anil conducting 
themselves with propriety when the attack was made. They were not armed, 
even their knives having been taken from them before they left the vessel. 

The assault upon those in the street car seemed to be only a signal for a 
general uprising ; and a mob which is variously estimated at from one thousand 
to two thousand people attacked our sailors with such fury that in a little while 
these men, whom no investigation could find guilty of any breach of the peace, 
were fleeing for their lives before an overwhelming crowd, anion tr which were a 



376 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

number of the police of Valparaiso. In this affray eighteen sailors were stabbed, 
several dying from their wounds. 

Of course, the United States Government at once communicated with the 
Chilian authorities on the subject, expressing an intention to investigate the 
occurrence fully. The first reply made to the American Government by Signor 
Matta, the Chilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, was to the effect that Chili would 
not allow anything to interfere with her own official investigation. 

An examination of all the facts was made on our part. It was careful and 
thorough, and showed that our flag had been insulted in the persons of American 
seamen. Yet, while the Chilian Court of Inquiry could present no extenuating 
facts, that country refused at first to offer apology or reparation for the affront. 

In the course of the correspondence Minister Matta sent a note of instruc- 
tion to Mr. Montt, Chilian representative at Washington, in which he used most 
offensive terms in relation to the United States, and directed that the' letter be 
given to the press for publication. 

After waiting for a long time for the result of the investigation at Valpa- 
raiso, and finding that, although no excuse or palliation had been found for the 
outrage, yet the Chilian authorities seemed reluctant to offer apology, the Presi- 
dent of the United States, in a message to Congress, made an extended state- 
ment of the various incidents of the case and its legal aspect, and stated that on 
the 2 ist of January he had caused a peremptory communication to be presented 
to the Chilian Government, by the American Minister at Santiago, in which 
severance of diplomatic relations was threatened if our demands for satisfac- 
tion, which included the withdrawal of Mr. Matta's insulting note, were not 
complied with. At the time that this message was delivered no reply had been 
sent to this note. 

Mr. Harrison's statement of the legal aspect of the case, upon which the 
final settlement of the difficulty was based was, that the presence of a war-ship 
of any nation in a port belonging to a friendly power is by virtue of a general 
invitation which nations are held to extend to each other ; that Commander 
Schley was invited, with his officers and crew, to enjoy the hospitality of Valpa- 
raiso ; that while no claim that an attack which an individual sailor may be 
subjected to raises an international question, yet where the resident population 
assault sailors' of another country's war vessels, as at Valparaiso, animated by- 
an animosity against the government to which they belong, that government 
must show the same enquiry and jealousy as though the representatives or flag 
of the nation had been attacked ; because the sailors are there by the order of 
their government. 

Finally an ultimatum was sent from the State Department at Washington, 
on the 25th, to Minister Egan, and was by him transmitted to the proper 
Chilian authorities. It demanded the retraction of Mr. Matta's note and suit- 



MATTA'S IMPUDENT LETTER. 



377 



able apology and reparation for the insult and injury sustained by the United 
States. On the 28th of January. 1892, a dispatch from Chili was received, in 
which the demands of our Government were fully acceded to, the offensive 
letter was withdrawn and regret was expressed for the trouble. In his relation 
to this particular case Minister Egan's conduct received the entire approval of 
his Government. 

While the United States looked for a peaceful solution of this annoying 
international episode, the proper preparations were made for a less desirable 





HARPER S FERRY. 



outcome. Our naval force was put in as efficient a condition as possible, and 
the vessels which were then in the navy yard were gotten ready for service with 
all expedition. If the Chilian war-scare did nothing else, it aroused a whole 
some interest in naval matters throughout the whole of the United States, and 
by focusing attention upon the needs of this branch of the public service, showed 
at once how helpless we might become in the event of a war with any first class 
power. We can thank Chili that to-day the United States Navy, while far from 
1 eing what, it should be, is in a better condition than at any time in our history. 




REVIEW OF UNION ARMIES AT WASHINGTON, AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 

S78 




CHAPTER XX. 

ARCTIC ADVENTURERS. 

' tfdmSebk/ F the earliest adventurers who first brought the news of Polar 
seas and Arctic cold to the wonder seeking world of Europe we 
have not the space to speak. Neither can we dwell upon the 
trials and triumphs of the adventurous Cabots, devoted Cor- 
tereals, Frobisher, Willoughby, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Barentz, 
Hudson or Baffin, who have all associated their names with the 
frozen regions of the North. 
Behring and the Russian explorers, Van Wrangel and Anjou, have written 
their records in the illimitable solitudes of ice. British heroes, Ross and Parry, 
Buchan and Franklin, as well as other later but not less noble Englishmen, 
have shown to what lengths men may go when actuated by the call of duty or 
the summons of a great idea. But with Frenchman, Hollander, Russian or 
Englishman we must have little to do in this chapter. 

Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames on his last voyage on the 9th of 
May, 1845. His two ships, the " Erebus " and "Terror," were provisioned for 
three years. On the 26th of July of that year they were seen by a whaler, 
moored to an iceberg, waiting for an opening in the ice field to advance into 
Baffin's Bay ; they were then two hundred and ten miles from the entrance to 
Lancaster sound. Towards the close of 1847 anxiety in England began to 
grow concerning the fate of the gallant Franklin and his command, and shortly 
three relief or search expeditions were sent out by the British government to try 
to obtain news of him. These were unsuccessful but were followed by others, 
some fitted up by private individuals and some by the government. Lady 
Franklin did much to keep the search alive, but to no purpose. 

THE FATE OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 

The fate of the intrepid Englishman was only known after years of careful 
search, and was learned little by little, hints and clues being fitted together till 
the outline of the pitiful story of disaster and failure could be read. 

From the time that the " Erebus" and " Terror" entered the narrow seas over 

379 



3 8o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

which the grim sentinel bergs stood guard till the latter vessel was nipped in 
the grinding floe, the peril was unremitting. No sadder sight can we imagine 
than the lonely graves that mark the desolate shores of Beechy Island ; no more 
disappointing search than that for the lost records has ever been made. 

Such men as Ross, Richardson, Collinson, Rae, Killett and McClure, in 
these unsuccessful efforts, added lustre to the Anglo-Saxon name. 

The English expeditions, though coming short of success, were not entirely 
without result. Captains Austin and Penny discovered Franklin's winter quar- 
ters on Beechy Island, in the winter of 1S45-46, but found no clue to his 
direction upon breaking camp. Dr. Rae brought home tidings also, and even 
discovered and obtained from the Esquimo, a number of Franklin relics. 

It is a noteworthy fact that Franklin added more to the world's knowledge 
of Arctic lands and seas by his death than he could have accomplished by his 
life, since a large proportion of the work done in that direction in the last half 
century has been in the course of efforts to discover the records of his last 
voyage. 

DR. KANE AND THE GRIXNELL EXPEDITION. 

The first of American explorers to join in the Franklin search was Elisha 
Kent Kane. His vessel, the "Advance," of 120 tons, was fitted up at the 
expense of Henry Grinnell and George Peabody, first in 1850. He reached 
Beechy Island and assisted in the search for Franklin records at the camp 
already mentioned, but returned without wintering. Later, in 1853, Dr. Kane 
once more sailed for Smith's Sound, from New York. It was on the last day of 
May that he left and August found him ice-locked in Smith's Sound, in /8°45' 
North, only about seventeen miles from the entrance. He wintered in Van 
Renssellaer Harbor. Though greatly hampered by sickness and want his party 
made a number of discoveries, that of the Humboldt Glacier being one of these. 
Traveling parties and even single individuals made excursions from the brig, and 
among these we must mention Morton, Dr. Kane's steward, who crossed the 
glacier with a dog team. After a second winter in the now unseaworthy brig, 
a winter that tried the souls of the brave little party that was sheltered there, — 
when cold, hunger and scurvy failed to subdue the indomitable courage and 
cheerfulness of the leader or his men, — the vessel that had come to be so much 
like home to them was abandoned to her fate and a masterly retreat commenced. 

With sledges and boats Dr. Kane conducted his command, the well 
helping the sick. Only one man died on the way to the Danish settlement 
of Upernevic, the most northerly habitation of civilized man in the world. 
All the records and instruments were saved, though the perilous journey 
led over pack and Hoe, glacier and hummock ice. 

Lieutenant Hartstene was sent in search of Dr. Kane's party, but 
reached Van Renssellaer harbor too late, overtaking the explorer, however, on 




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I SIR JOHN FRANKLIN. 2. THE " EREBUS " AND " TERROR " ENTERING THE ARCTIC REGIONS. 3. FRANKLINS 

WINTER QUARTERS IN 1845-6. 4. THE "EREBUS'' AND "TERROR" AMONG ICEBERGS. 5. THE 

"TERROR" NIPPED IN THE ICE. 



3§2 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



his return trip. Kane's expedition, though not a success so far as the finding 
of Franklin was concerned, was yet of great benefit to science, since he 
added new lands to geography, and completer physical observations than any 
explorer had previously done ; besides this his valuable notes of the Etah 
Esquimo have been of benefit to all succeeding travelers in the frozen North. 

DR. haves' discovers grinnell land. 
D. J. J. Hayes, Kane's surgeon, was the first white man to put foot on 
Grinnell Land. During one part of the sojourn in Van Renssellaer Bay, 




KANE AND HIS COMPANION'S IN TIIEIK VESSEL. 



Hayes took a party, and started southward to Upernevic, which, however, he 
did not reach, and finally returned, almost dead with fatigue, exposure, and 
hunger, to his chief, who received him with great kindness, though the attempt 
to leave the main party was unauthorized. 

Later, Hayes led a separate expedition to the Arctic regions, sailing from 
Boston for Smith's Sound, in the schooner "United States," in July of i860. 



;S 4 77//:' 5 

Following up the line of research commenced by Dr. Kane, he proceeded to 
Port Foulke, where he wintered in ~s i- North 1 at. One of his most note- 
worthy exploits was crossing Smith's Sound in sledges. 

Another remarkable American explorer was Charles Hall, of Cincinnati, 
whoso first voyage was made in i860. He was a man of humble origin, who 
had made his own wax and devoted himself, his money, and his intellect to the 

l for Franklin, with the purest enthusiasm. 1 lis first find was the stone 
house built by Martin Frobisher on the Countess oi Warwick Island. 

1 tail's second expedition was die one most generally known. Begun in 
it lasted until [869, and by the exercise of patience, endurance, and 
pertinacity seldom equaled, the searcher finally was rejoiced to find the line ol 
Franklin's retreat at Todd's Island and Peffer River, on the south coast of King 
William band. Then he learned from the Esquimo the sad story of the wreck 
oi one oi the vessels, and that seven bodies were buried at Todd's bland. lie 
brought home the bones o( one. supposed to be lieutenant le Vescount 

THE DE VTH OF CAPTAIN II VI 1 . 

Again, in 1S71, Hall made his third and, as it proved, his last voyage in 
the " Polaris." 1 le penetrated 250 miles to the northward of Smith's Sound and 
was ice locked on the 30th of August oi that year in 82 10' North. The 
following winter he spent at a spot called Thank God bay, a degree further 
south than his farthest point. 

While the "Polaris" was ice locked there. Hall suddenly died and the 
captain. Budington, prepared to abandon her. While his preparations were 
being made, and during the time that some of the party were out upon the ice 
with a quantity of provisions, the vessel broke away, and those upon the ice 
made one oi the most remarkable journeys on record, being rescued only after 
they had drifted two thousand miles on the floe. 

While these voyages were being made, Robert Brown, Captain Nares, 
Nordenskiold, Sir Henry Gore, booth, Markham, and many other noted 
foreigners were adding to their fame in the Frigid Zone. Nordenskiold 
discovered die Northeast passage, that had been the dream of Navigators for 
more than three centuries. 

In 1879 Lieutenant Schwatka headed an expedition from the United States, 
his object being to explore thoroughly the west coast ot King \\ illiam's 
Land in search of Franklin's records. He wintered in Hudson Bay, near 
Chesterfield inlet. This expedition was from t remarkable for one 

fact, that it was the first that had subsisted upon the game of the country. 
The traveling was all by land, or rather ice. and was accomplished without 
d to weather or temperature. From the winter camp, overland tor the 
estuary of the great Fish River. Schwatka started in the early spring of 



H 1 1 II ■■ «j 111 Ml | |W II ■! ■■!■■ ■! M^ ■■■ »■)■■■! 




THE FARTHEST NORTH REACHED BV LIEUT. LOCKWOOD ON THE i.llHJV EXPEDITION 
3«S 



386 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

with only one month's provisions. The complete record of this expedition, 
as told by Mr. Gilder, the second in command, is full of interest. The search 
over the ground where the survivors of the Franklin party had been traced 
was minute. Esquimo witnesses were examined, and every cairn, every heap 
of stones was scrutinized, till at length the inevitable conclusion was forced 
upon them that the Franklin records were lost forever. During the search the 
grave of an officer of the "Terror" was discovered and identified by the clothing 
and trinkets. This was Lieutenant Irving, the third officer of the ill-fated vessel. 

THE "JEANNETTE" AND HER COMMANDER. 

The " Jeannette" left San Francisco on July 8, 1879, with Captain De Long 
in command. Her crew numbered thirty-three men. She was put into the ice 
pack in two months from the time of her departure and frozen in before the 
end of November. For two years her people supported the hardships and 
deprivations of Arctic winters, and at last, in June, 1881, the "Jeannette" sank. 

Then began a long, perilous and ill-fated retreat, of which the interesting 
record is to be found in the journal of the unfortunate Commander. It is a 
story of heroic endeavors to cross the ice fields, from the time when the loaded 
boats left the sinking "Jeannette " to the hour when the hand of the writer could 
no longer hold his pencil. 

In many respects the narrative of cold and fog, of refractory dogs, broken 
sledges, sudden immersions and disastrous losses is much like those of other 
explorers of the Frozen Zone. But its pathos is deeper, because its record of 
unwavering courage and manliness is so abundant. Yet sometimes De Long 
uttered a note of regret, as when he writes, on |uly 4, 'Si: "Our flags are 
flying in honor of the day. though to me it is a blue one. Three years ago 
to-day, at Havre, the 'Jeannette' was christened, and many pleasant things were 
said and anticipations formed, all of which have gone down with the ship. I 
did not think then that three years afterwards would see us all out on the ice 
with nothing accomplished and a story of a lost ship to come back to our well- 
wishers at home. My duty to those who came with me is to see them safely 
back, and to devote all my mind and strength to that end. * * * I must 
endeavor to look my misfortune in the face and to learn what its application 
may be. It will be hard, however, to be known hereafter as a man who under- 
took a polar expedition and sunk his ship in the seventy-seventh parallel." 

But the " nothing accomplished" was changed to rejoicing on the 29th of 
that same month, when, after a most critical journey over rough and broken ice, 
battling almost constantly with an impenetrable fog, he used a piece of floe ice 
for a ferry boat and from this strange craft landed on the shore of an island 
hitherto undiscovered. In the journal he records his address to the men of his 
command. 



THE GREELY EXPEDITION. 



387 



" I have to announce to you that this island, toward which we have been 
struggling for more than two weeks, is newly discovered land. I therefore take 
possession of it in the name of the President of the U. S., and name it Bennett 
Island." 

Upon the Northern coast of the mainland of Siberia, after untold hardships, 
De Long landed and then perished. 

The "Jeannette" expedition was planned and financially backed by James 
Gordon Bennett, but it had been adopted and made national by an Act of Con- 
gress, so that the obligation to find and rescue, if possible, those who had 
survived the sinking of the vessel was imperative. After the separation of the 
boats, which occurred before reaching the mainland, Lieutenant Melville with 
part of the crew reached Irkutsch, and as soon as practicable he set out in 
search of De 
Long. On March 
23, 1 S83, the body 
of the latter, to- 
gether with two 
of his men, was 
found. They had 
perished irom 
starvation. Two 
steamers w e re 
sent in search of 
the " Jeannette " 
party from the 
United States; 
one of these, the 
"Rodgers," un- 
der Lieutenant Berry, was burned in her winter quarters north ot \\ rangell 
Land, after doing excellent work in exploration, having reached the highest 
point ever attained on that meridian. One of the officers, Mr. Gilder, made a 
hazardous home journey through Siberia. 

A suggestion was made, in 1875, by Lieutenant Weyprecht, a German, to 
establish an international system of polar stations for synchronous meteorological 
and magnetic observations and records. Weyprecht died too soon to see his 
plan carried into effect, but, later, eight nations agreed to follow it, and among 
these was our own. 

On June 14. 1881, the Lady Franklin Bay expedition, usually known as the 
Greely expedition, sailed from Baltimore by way of St. John's, Newfoundland, 
for Smith's Sound. Lieutenant Greely was in command, and second to him was 
the lamented Lieutenant Lockwood, while Dr. Pavey was the physician of the 




A FUNERAL IN THE ARf'TIC REGIONS 



3 88 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

party. .They proceeded with a full corps of men, on the steamer " Protean," to 
Lady Franklin Bay, where, finding the season exceptionally favorable, a house 
was built, in which they stored two years' provisions. 

The great and fatal mistake of the Government in regard to this expedition 
was the failure to provide an intermediate supply station which could be visited 
by vessels from the South, and to which the voyagers might retreat in case 
of need. 

From the start two regular sets of observations were made and the scientific 
work of the party, which was preserved through all the subsequent disasters and 
hazards, was perfectly successful. 

History does not present a more heroic story than that of the continuance 
of the work of observation, when disease and famine had reduced the strength 
of the party so that the living were not able always to bury the dead, and the 
gaunt, haggard forms of the survivors staggered to their work till the last vestige 
of strength had utterly failed. The soldier who stands to his gun through the 
hot climax of some terrific battle does not achieve such a triumphant mastery 
over defeat as did the heroes of Cape Sabine. 

At first all went well. Some brilliant work was done. Dr. Pavey with one 
companion made a northward excursion that will be ever memorable, and few 
members of the command failed to distinguish themselves by pluck, endurance 
and devoted fidelity to comrades. But the crowning success of the expedition, 
so far as the work of exploration went, was made by Lieutenant Lockwood. 

He made a journey along the north coast of Greenland, establishing new 
lines upon that hitherto unchartered waste, and then, turning his sledges north- 
ward still further, reached a small island in S3 24' N. and stood in a higher 
latitude than any to which a human being has penetrated since the first attempt 
to pierce the Arctic solitudes. Sergeant Brainard who accompanied him, wrote 
in his journal this note : "We unfurled the glorious stars and stripes to the 
exhilarating Northern breezes with an exultation impossible to describe." 

After the return of Lockwood and Brainard with their party, great hard- 
ships overtook the Greely command. In the summer of 1883 the expected help 
did not arrive, relieving vessels failing to reach them. Falling back upon Cape 
Sabine in Smith's Sound, which they reached in August of 1883, they subsisted 
for a little while upon the stores left there by Sir George Nares and then began 
to give way to that most dreadful enemy, famine. When at length the steamers 
" Thetis " and " Bear " arrived and the gallant commander Schley completed the 
long attempted rescue, only Lieutenant Greely and six companions were left 
alive, and these were helplessly awaiting the death they had faced so long. 
Reverently the American reads the record of their daring and suffering, and 
pays the tribute of admiration both to the few survivors and the many for whom 
the relief came too late. 




Xjggjjl f$^M 




PLACES OK WORSHIP IN NEW YORK IN 1 742. 
4. New Dutch. 5. Old Dutch. 6. Presbyterian. 7. 



ptist. 8. Quaker. 9 Syr 




CHAPTER XXI. 

RELIGION UNDER. NEW CONDITIONS. 

~X HE physical and social conditions by which die early settlers of this 
S ^(® country were environed after reaching it were hardly more diverse 
from those to which they had been accustomed than were the new 
conditions of their religious life. The tendency of their sur- 
roundings, however clear or vague to their apprehension, was, it 
is now evident, toward the development of an order of things in 
their communities akin to, if not identical with, the primitive 
Hebrew commonwealth. Absolute equality of religious relations among the 
individuals of the nation was a cardinal principle in the genius of that common- 
wealth, but the conception of the principle, along with any grasp of what it 
involved, had lapsed from the minds of most men in Europe before the 
discovery of America, — where, as is plain enough in our day, it is ultimately 
to have such illustration as the world has not yet seen. The seeds for its 
growth came to these shores with some of the settlers, and a survey of 
facts will emphasize the statement. 

Protestant Episcopalianism, known in America prior to the American Revolu- 
tion as the "Church of England," was established in Virginia as early as 1686, 
its first rector in America being the Rev. Robert Hunt. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 
of England (1 539-1 583), was the first to direct his attention to this country from 
religious considerations, and when the Virginia Company obtained its charter 
one of its articles provided for the "preaching of the true Word and the praise 
of God," not only in the American colonies, but as far as possible among the 
savages bordering upon them. The Rev. Mr. Whitaker succeeded Rector 
Hunt, and was denominated the "Apostle of Virginia." He was the first 
Protestant who baptized an Indian convert, and that convert was Pocahontas, 
daughter of the Chief, Powhatan. In 1787 the American Episcopal Church 
became independent of the English, and assumed the name of The Protestant 
Episcopal Church in the United States, — Rev. Dr. William White, of Philadelphia, 

389 



39° 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Pa., and Rev. Dr. Samuel Provost, of New York city, its first bishops,* being conse- 
crated as such by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth Palace., the 
archiepiscopal residence in London, England, February 4, of that year. 

Next in order of time came hither the English Pilgrims, Puritans, and 
Congregationalists. Their story is well known. The Pilgrims landed on 
Plymouth Rock, in the present State of Massachusetts, and held their first 
religous services on Sabbath, December 22, 1620, the number of their churches 
in the world at that date, which can now be identified, being not more than five 
or six. In 1629 a church was organized at Salem, Mass., one at Charlestown, in 

1630; another at Duxbury, in 1632, 
and others still, soon after, in Connec- 
ticut. By the census of 1890 the num- 
ber of Congregational organizations 
in the United States was 4857, with 
church property in the denomination 
valued at $43,243,962, and a member- 
ship of 5 1 1 , 1 98 persons. 

Third in order of arrival were the 
Lutherans, the earliest settlement of 
the denomination being made by emi- 
grants from Holland to New York 
soon after the first establishment of 
the Dutch in that city, in 1621. They 
did not enjoy the services of a pastor 
of their own faith until after the colony 
fell into the hands of the English in 
1 664. In 1 638 emigrants from Sweden 
founded a Lutheran church at the 
present Wilmington, Del. In 1890 the 
Lutheran Communion in the United 
States had S427 organizations or con- 
gregations, with 6559 church edifices ; its church property was valued at 
$34,218,234, and its communicants numbered 1,199,514. 

The first of the American Reformed Protestant Dutch churches (known 
since 1867 as The First Re formed Church in America) was gathered in New 
York city in 1628. The minister was Rev. Jonas Michaelius, and the Dutch 
language was exclusively used in their churches until 1 764, when Rev. Archibald 
Laidlie, a Scotch minister from Flushing in Holland, connected himself with the 




BIBLE BROUGHT OVER IN THE " MAYFLOWER " IN 
PILGRIM HALL, NEW PLYMOUTH. 



* The consecration of Bishop Samuel Seabury by Episcopal bishops at Aberdeen, Scotland, in 
1784, was for " the churches of the Episcopal persuasion in Connecticut, in North America." 



NUMERICAL STRENGTH OF THE SECTS. 391 

Dutch Church, was invited to New York, and there commenced services in the 
English tongue. The returns of the eleventh (1890) United States census give 
the Reformed Dutch Church in the country 572 organizations ; value of church 
property, $10,340,159 ; members, 92,970. 

The history of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States properly 
begins with the settlement of Maryland by a colony of Catholics and Protestants 
under the auspices of Lord Baltimore. These people located at St. Mary's, Md., 
in 1634. In 1890 this denomination of Christians had within the limits of the 
United States 10,221 organizations or congregations, 8766 houses of worship, 
valued at $118,381,516, and 6,250,045 communicants. 

The Associated Baptists followed next, Rev. Roger Williams, who had been 
assistant preacher to the Congregational Church at Salem, Mass., going to the 
present Providence, R. I., after his final banishment from the Massachusetts 
Colony (1635), and forming there the first Baptist church in America, in 1639. 
A second Baptist church organization was effected at Newport, R. I., in 1644. 

As early as 1640 Irish Presbyterians came to this country, but accredited 
historians of the denomination are chary of statement as to the time of the 
organization of the earliest Presbyterian Church in America. Authority, how- 
ever, establishes the fact that in 1683 Rev. Francis Mackemie came from the 
North of Ireland and began to gather the people at Rehoboth, in Maryland, and 
elsewhere, into Presbyterian churches, the first Presbytery being formed of seven 
ministers, at Philadelphia, Pa., in 1705. The church at Jamaica, L. I., organized 
in 1662, claims to have been Presbyterian in polity at the date of its formation. 
The organizations of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in 1890 are 
reported from the Census Office as 6717; value of church property as 
$74,445,200; members, 788,224. 

Methodist Episcopal classes in America were founded by Philip Embury, — 
the first in New York city, in 1766. The earliest Methodist preaching-place was 
dedicated on John Street in that city, in 1768. Two years later the first Metho- 
dist church edifice in Philadelphia, Pa., was built. December 25, 1784, at 
Baltimore, Md., sixty Methodist clergymen met in General Conference and 
formally constituted The Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. This 
body of Christians had in the United States, by the census of 1890, 25,863 
organizations; church property valued at $86,718,808, and 2,229,281 members. 

Concerning each of these sects, which have been the most prominent of 
those in the United States, — although in a qualified sense as to some of them, — 
and, in general, of all immigrants who have come to the United States or its 
Territories, two things of cardinal importance are to be observed in any 
adequate view of the subject of this chapter. The first is, that they came to 
America from countries where the union of Church and State, the possession 
and use of power within the Church by the civil government, and the allowance 



392 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to the State of that power within the Church, by the Church itself, in return 
for benefits received, — with the more or less frequent and large use of power 
in civil affairs by the Church itself, — prevailed in greater or in less degree. 
Another fact not to be lost sight of is that most of them came, and come in our 
day, from lands where they had always felt the dominant authority of a hierarchy 
or priesthood, in things spiritual, and not seldom in things secular, as an element 
the activity of which was unremitting. It has well been said that only in the 
United States of America has the experiment ever been tried (and it began here 
with the coming of the early settlers) of applying Christianity to man and to 
society without the intervention of the State, and with a continually lessening 
power, among the clergy, of imposing their will either upon the Church or upon 
individuals within the Church. This has made the history of the Christian 
Church within the United States, more emphatically, of course, in some regions 
than in others, — but yet within all regions, — a history with such peculiarities as 
.these: " i. its history is not the record of the conversion of a new people, but 
of the transplanting of old races, already Christianized, to a new theatre, com- 
panitively untrammeled by institutions and traditions ; 2. independence of the 

civil power; 3. the voluntary principle 
applied to the support of religious insti- 
tutions ; 4. moral and ecclesiastical, but 
not civil power the means of retaining the 
es of new vork in i 74 6. members of any communion ; 5. develop- 

ment of the Christian Church in its prac- 
tical and moral aspects rather than in its theoretical and theological ; 6. stricter 
discipline in the churches than is practicable when Church and State are one ; 
7. increase of the churches to a considerable extent through revivals of religion 
rather than by the natural growth of children in an establishment ; 8. excessive 
multiplication of sects and division on questions of moral reform." ::: 

Such has been the tendency of things in this section of the New World 
from the outset of its settlement by the whites, and if any of the American 
colonies, for instance that of the Massachusetts Bay, founded their social fabric 
on the theory of uniting Church and State, or, to speak with precision, by making 
the Church the State, the attempt was abortive, and in its issue sustained the 
statements now made. It will assuredly prove interesting to observe the working 
of these new conditions in certain outer aspects of religious life and experience. 
Those aspects were not, indeed, directly or solely the fruit of the conditions 
to which we have referred. Many other conditions conspired with these to 
produce them, such as the antecedent experience of the settlers in Europe, the 
untamed Nature that was around them, the perils and exposure incident to pioneer 

* Professor Henry B. Smith : Tables of Church History. 




PHASES OF RELIGIOUS LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND. 393 

life, aggravated by the proximity, and often by the hostility, of the Indians, lords 
of the soil before the seventeenth century. But a prime fact in this connection 
is that in large portions of the country the resultant of the influences that 
moulded the religious life of the early settlers was to impart to its spirit a quality 
of grimness that was almost sombre. This was especially true of the New 
England settlements, although it is not true to the extent which has ordinarily 
been alleged. But it existed in New England beyond any other part of the 
colonies, and the confirmation of the statement is not far to find in more than 
one direction. As this appeared in the social life of New England communities, 
one may come near toward gauging it by the influence it had upon the 
observance of the Sabbath. 

Very much has been said concerning what have been styled the " blue 
laws" of the New Haven Colony, founded in 1638, and the three that follow 
have been most bitterly ridiculed : — 

" No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath 
Day. 

" Xo woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day. 

" No one shall ride on the Sabbath Day, or walk in his garden, or elsewhere, except reverently 
to and from meeting." 

But since these " laws," so-called, had no existence in any New England 
code, colonial or other, but are merely citations lrom a " General History of 
Connecticut," printed in England, in 1781, by the Rev. Samuel A. Peters, some- 
time Tory rector of the Episcopal churches at Hartford and at Hebron, in that 
Colony, after he had been forced to fly from America to England, in which work 
he poured out the vials of his wrath upon the land from which he had taken his 
departure, it does not seem worth one's while to dwell upon them. 

It is not, however, to be gainsaid that among the Puritans in early New 
England the personal conduct of citizens upon the Sabbath was subject to 
judicial supervision and animadversion, to such a degree that the suggestion of 
its imitation in our day would be almost universally regarded as impertinence. 
This was so not only in Connecticut and Massachusetts, but in other New 
England Provinces and States. In New London, Connecticut, during the latter 
part of the seventeenth century, we find that a "wicked fisherman" was prose- 
cuted before the Court and fined for catching fish on the "Lord's Day," while 
another was fined 20 s. for sailing a boat on the same day. In 1670, at the same 
place, two lovers, John Lewis and Sarah Chapman, were tried for sitting together 
on the " Lord's Day" under an apple tree in Goodman Chapman's orchard, an 
act not violently unnatural, and surely, in itself considered, without harm. In 
Plymouth, Massachusetts, a man was sharply whipped for shooting fowl on 
Sunday ; another man was fined for carrying home a grist of corn on the " Lord's 
Day," and the miller who allowed him to take it was also fined. Elizabeth 



394 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Eddy, of the same town, was fined, in 16S2, "ten shillings for wringing and 
hanging out clothes." A Plymouth, Massachusetts, man, for attending to his 
tar-pits on the Sabbath, was set in the stocks. James Watt, in 1685, was 
publicly reproved " for writing a note about common business on the Lord's 
Day, at least in the evening somewhat too soon." A Plymouth, Massachusetts, 
man, who drove a yoke of oxen, was " presented " before the Court, as was also 
another offender who drove some cows a short distance " without need " on the 
Sabbath. 

In Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1646, Aquila Chase and his wife were 
presented and fined for gathering peas from their garden on the Sabbath, but 
upon investigation the fines were remitted, and the offenders were only admon- 
ished. In Wareham, Massachusetts, in 1772, William Estis acknowledged himself 
guilty of" racking hay on the Lord's Day" and was fined ten shillings ; and in 
1774 another Wareham citizen, "for a breach of the Sabbath in puling apples," 
was fined five shillings. A Dunstable, Massachusetts, soldier, for "wetting a 
piece of an old hat to put in his shoe" to protect his foot, — for doing this piece 
of heavy work on the "Lord's Day" was fined, and paid, forty shillings. And 
Captain Kemble, of Boston, Massachusetts, was, in 1656, set for two hours in the 
town stocks, for his "lewd and unseemly behavior," which consisted in kissing 
his wife, " publicquely," on the Sabbath Day, upon the doorstep of his house, 
when he had just returned from a voyage and absence of three years. Similar 
citations might be multiplied, but this topic may be dismissed by a quotation 
from another author, who says, truly : " The legislation thrown about the Sabbath 
was in confirmation of the public opinion regarding its sanctity. The harsher 
aspects of this observance have been sufficiently dwelt on in our histories ; the 
effect upon character has been less considered, but the elevation of one day out 
of the tyranny of work, the resolute facing of eternal mysteries, and the with- 
drawal into a half-brooding, half-active state of mind, must have had a powerful 
effect upon the imagination and conscience. The " meeting-house " was no holy 
building, but the Sabbath Day was a holy day, and was the most comprehensive 
symbol of the Puritan faith. It was what the altar is in the Catholic Church, the 
holy of holies, about which the whole movement of religious worship gathered. 
Whatever disturbed the profound stillness of the clay was seized on by the law 
as sacrilegious ; and never, perhaps, has there been a religion which succeeded 
so completely in investing time with the sacredness which elsewhere had been 
appropriated by place. Even the approach to the Sabbath was guarded, and the 
custom of the observance of Saturday evening appears to have been derived from 
the backward influence of the day, as the release upon Sunday evening appears 
to have been a concession to the flesh, which would otherwise have rebelled. 
Rev. Dr. Horace Bushnell, in his "Age of Homespun," tells of his own experi- 
ence in boyhood, when he was refused a load of apples which he had gone to buy 



THE PURITAX MLVISTER. 



395 



on Saturday afternoon, because the farmer, on consulting the sun, decided that 
he could not measure out the fruit before the strict Sabbath began ! * 

A strong factor, not only in enforcing this observance of the Sabbath, but in 
fashioning the whole religious character and life of the New England Colonists, 
was the Puritan minister. 

The reach of his influence, and the extent to which it was employed by the 
Puritan minister, take on a grotesque air to modern contemplation, — earnest, 
pure and noble men, as most of the ministers certainly were, zealous for every 
enterprise that they believed would promote the common weal, however 
toilsome, or involving whatever degree of self-sacrifice. Thus, one minister felt 
it necessary to reprove a money-making parishioner who had stored and was 
holding in reserve (with the hope of higher prices) a large quantity of corn, 
which was sadly needed for consumption in the town. The parson preached 
from the appropriate text, Proverbs zi, 26: " He that withholdeth his corn, the 
people shall curse him ; but blessings shall be upon the head of him that selleth 
it." As the minister grew warmer in his explanation and application of the text, 




SOME BOSTON SPIRES. 1 758. 



the money-seeking corn-storer defiantly and unregenerately sat up, stiff and 
unmoved, until at last, the preacher, provoked out of prudence and patience, 
roared out, " Colonel Ingraham, Colonel Ingraham ! you know I mean you ; 
why don't you hang down your head ? " f 

That, as a class, the Puritan ministers were autocrats in the community, and 
that they never hesitated to show their authority, in any manner, in the pulpit, 
and not seldom elsewhere, is plain from a slight knowledge of facts. If any 
evil-doer, moreover, incredulous of their position, set himself to try conclusions 
with them, he came off second best in the encounter. In Sandwich, Mass., a man 
was publicly whipped for speaking deridingly of God's word and ordinances as 
taught by the Sandwich minister. Mistress Oliver was forced to stand, in 
public, with a cleft stick on her tongue, for " reproaching the Elders." At New 
Haven, Conn., a man was severely whipped and fined for declaring that he 



* H. E. Scudder's "Noah Webster," in series "American Men of Letters," pp. 30, ; 
f Cited from "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," by Alice Morse Earle, p. 313. 



396 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

received no profit from the minister's sermons. A terrible shock was given to 
the Windham, Conn., Church, in 1729, by the "vile and slanderous expressions" 
of one unregenerate Windhamite, who said, "I had rather hear my dog bark, 
than Mr. Bellamy preach." He was warned that he would be "shaken off and 
given up ;" and terrified at the prospect of so dire a fate, he read a confession of 
his sorrow and repentance, and promised to "keep a guard over his tongue," 
and also to listen to Mr. Bellamy's preaching, which may have been a still more 

difficult task In 1631, Philip Ratcliffe, for "speaking against the 

churches " had his ears cut off, was whipped and banished.* 

The reverence entertained for the ministers, which gave them their author- 
ity, is evidenced by the whimsical epithets and descriptions which were freely 
applied to the parsons. They were called "holy-heavenly," "sweet-affecting," 
"soul-ravishing," "heaven-piercing," "angel-rivaling," "subtle," " irrefragible," 
"angelical," " septemfluous," "holy-savored," "princely," "soul-appetizing," 
"full of antic tastes" (meaning having the tastes of an antiquary), "God- 
bearing," etc. 

Withal, however, many of the Puritan clergy were men of cheery dispo- 
sitions. Nor did they always hold themselves from the humanities, the hilarities, 
and the sports of their people. The best cider in Massachusetts, — that which 
brought the highest price, — was known as the Arminian cider, because the 
minister who furnished it in the market was suspected of having Arminian 
tendencies. A very telling compliment to the cider of one of the first New 
England ministers is thus recorded : " Mr. Whiting had a score of apple-trees, 
from which he made delicious cyder. And it hath been said yt an Indyan once 
coming to hys house, and Mistress Whiting giving him a drynk of ye cyder, he 
did sett down ye pot and say yt Adam and Eve were rightly damned for eating 
ye appills in ye Garden of Eden ; they should have made them into cyder." 

Of so much account were the barrels of cider, and so highly prized 

were they by the ministers, that one honest soul did not hesitate to thank the 
Lord, in the pulpit, for the "many barrels of cider vouchsafed to us this year."*}* 

The Puritan clergyman ordinarily served his flock for very small pecuniary 
compensation. In 1630, the First Court of Massachusetts set the amount of 
the minister's annual stipend to be ^20, or ,£30, according to the wealth of the 
community, and made it a public charge. A large portion of the salaries in 
early parishes being paid in corn and labor, the amounts were established by 
fixed rates upon the inhabitants ; and the amount of land owned and cultivated 
by each church-member was considered in reckoning his assessment. These 
amounts were called "voluntary contributions." If, however, any citizen refused 

* Cited from "The Sabbath in Puritan New England," by Alice Morse Earle, pp. 259, 260. 
t Loc. a'/., pp. 287, 288. 



THE PURITAN MINISTER'S 1 REACHING. 



397 



to contribute, he was taxed; and if he refused to pay his church-tax, he could be 
(mid. imprisoned, or pilloried. 

It may be said of the Puritan minister, as we leave him, that with all his 
traits, he was usually at or near the bottom of every good enterprise where his 
lot was cast. Patient, self-denying-, determined, sincere, he did his work in his 
day. He has passed from among men, but it is a question worthy of thought, — 
how many men has he left behind him his equals in the apprehension and 
discharge of human obligation according to the best standards of duty? One 
cannot err in distinctly recognizing the influence of his preaching upon the 
religious life of his time. Alike its matter and style moulded thought and con- 
duct. Biblical, clear, pungent as it certainly was, in by far the greater number 
of cases, its disproportionate emphasis of the doctrines of Divine Sovereignty 
and God's Election of Grace, made the piety of its hearers, in multitudes of 
instances, take on a se- 
verity of aspect which it 
is to be hoped, in greater 
or in less degree mis- 
represented the practi- 
cal Christian faith that 
was in them. Many ci- 
tations could be presen- 
ted to show the quality 
of the preaching which 
produced this. We quote 
two. Rev.Thomas Hook- 
er ( 1 586—1 647), pastor 
of the first church at 
Hartford, Connecticut, 

was doubtless one of the wisest and ablest of New England Puritan ministers, 
but in making the point that the conversion of a human soul to Christ is 
a great and difficult thing, he averred "it is not a little mercey that will 

serve the turn The Lord will make all crack before thou 

shalt find mercey." So he argued on the necessity of a clear view of his 
own siniulness, it a man is to be saved, in the following language: "As 
suppose any soul here present were to behold the damned in hell, and if 
the Lord should give thee a little peepe-hole into hell, that thou didst see the 
horror of those damned souls, and thy heart begins to shake in consideration 
thereof; then propound this to thy owne heart what pains the damned in hell doe 
endure for sinne, and thy heart will quake and shake at it; the least sinne that ever 
thou didst commit, though thou makest a light matter of it, is a greater evill than 
the paines of the damned in hell, setting aside their sinne; all the torments in 




THE FIKsT FRI 



398 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

hell are not so great an evil as the least sinne is ; men begin to shrink at this, 
and loathe to go down to hell and to be in endless torments." And his son-in- 
law, Rev. Thomas Shepard, of Newtown, Massachusetts, put the matter thus, in 

his " Sincere Convert:" "Jesus Christ is not got with a wet finger 

It is a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved." And again : " 'Tis a 
thousand to one if ever thou bee one of that small number whom God hath 
picked out to escape this wrath to come." 

Something akin to the unloveliness of spirit which manifested itself as being 
in part, at least, the result of inordinate preaching on the doctrines which have 
been named, was reflected, in the earlier colonial days, by their church edifices, or 
" meeting-houses," as the Puritans preferred to call them. Doubtless they built 
them in given cases, perhaps in most cases, as well as was possible at the time, 
and with emphasis, it may be said that the impulse which led to their construc- 
tion was worthy of all praise, but nothing can be conceived more bald and 
ugly than many of these structures, of which the earliest and most primitive type 
was a simple, square log-house, with clay-filled chinks, surmounted by steep 
roofs, thatched with long straw or grass, and often with only the beaten earth 
for a floor. The second form or type of New England church architecture was a 
square wooden building, usually unpainted, covered with a truncated pyramidal 
roof, — surmounted, if the church could afford that, with a belfry or turret contain- 
ing a bell. The third form of the meeting-house was that of which the ''Old 
South," at Boston, Massachusetts, was a model. This has too many representa- 
tives in the New England States at the present day, to need any description. In 
the stage of New England life which followed its first phase, these buildings 
were usually placed upon the hill-tops, and some of the hills were so steep, 
especially in one Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down 
on horseback, but were forced to scramble down, leading their horses, and to 
mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. These early churches were 
destitute of shade; curtains and window-blinds were unknown, and they often 
had grotesque decorations, — grinning wolves' heads nailed under the windows 
and by the side of the door, while splashes of blood, which had dripped from the 
severed necks, reddened the logs beneath, — the meeting-house being the place 
where these ornaments were to be fastened up to secure the bounty given for 
hunting and slaying them. Around the meeting-house, upon the " green," stood 
the stocks, the whipping-post, the pillory and cage, and on the weekly lecture-days, 
the stocks and pillory were often occupied by convicted wrong-doers. And hard-by 
were to be seen the "Sabbath- Day Houses," in which small buildings the families 
of the Puritans took refreshment at noon on the Lord's Day, and in the winters 
warmed themselves by the fires that had no place in the icy houses of worship ; — 
the boys, in some parishes, the meanwhile, listening to Biblical ' Expositions, or 
to the reading of another sermon to keep them quiet during the "nooning." 



THE REFORMED DUTCH CHURCH. 



399 



All this was far away from the Old World surroundings in which many of 
the settlers had worshiped, and far away, too, from any tendency to aesthetic 
culture ; but let it not be forgotten that in these homely places the men and 
women met for Christian services, who, with others, laid broad and deep the 
foundations alike of civil and religious freedom on this continent. 

With limitations, a picture somewhat similar to that of the New England 
Puritan clergyman might truthfully be drawn concerning the clergy ot the 
Reformed Dutch Church in the United States. Although the Dutch came to 
America for purposes of trade, their West India Company having been chartered 




in Holland in 1621, and although it was the Company itself which formally 
established the Church of Holland in America, and promised themselves to 
maintain ministers (no call upon a minister being valid unless endorsed by the 
Company), the staunch convictions of the Dutch clergy made themselves felt by 
their people as an element of power for their spiritual development. Thirteen 
Dutch ministers came out to New Amsterdam (New York) prior to the surrender 
of that colony to England in 1664, and there were, at that date, eleven Dutch 
churches in America, served by seven clergymen. If, by reason of the facts 
already stated, the Dutch minister fell in any measure below his New England 



400 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

clerical brother in the possession and exercise of personal authority, it was by 
reason of the same facts, in part, that his remove from the ordinary life of the 
community was less pronounced, and his familiarity with all classes more inti- 
mate. Historically, the flavor of a Dutch "Dominie's" social and ministerial 
relations to his people has in it something of especial attractiveness to one keen to 
apprehend, and broad enough to appreciate it, and the churches of that com- 
munion, if they do not form in our day one of the largest religious denomina- 
tions, have, as yet, "kept the 'ancient' faith" in its purity, — always the 
exponents of soundness in doctrine and in life. 

Far different, in the outward conditions of his work, from those which have 
surrounded nearly all other Protestant clergymen in the United States, was the 
early experience of the Methodist minister, but the effect of his ministry has not 
been less potent, and has been more far-reaching than that of many other clergy- 
men, covering with benign results widespread regions of the country. His direct 
errand, it was long since understood, has been, as the phrase goes, to the masses 
in the community, and the ecclesiastical system through which its founder in 
America sought to discharge that errand has been found to be adapted to its 
end in a remarkable degree. It was Francis Asbury (i 745-1816) who brought it 
to our shores, from England. He had learned it from John Wesley. And one 
does not go aside from the truth who reckons the " circuit riding " feature of the 
system to have been the life-blood of its power, for many years at least, after the 
establishment of Methodism in this country. Its essence lay in the setting 
apart of definite portions of country for steady visitation by the Rider, who was 
the preacher for that region, and his constant travel through his circuit, for the 
purpose of holding preaching services whenever and wherever he could get a 
hearing. It is a somewhat curious fact that when he came to the colonies from 
England, in 1 77 1, Asbury found the very few Methodist preachers who were here 
disinclined to circuit labor. But he knew its working in England and in Wales 
by far too well to desist from the attempt to establish it. Always making him- 
self a practical circuit-rider, whatever his relations to a given church, he traveled 
thousands of miles each year after his appointment to the Bishopric, in labors 
and in exposure a measure of which it is far easier to conceive of than it would 
be to experience, in the performance of his duties. He succeeded in fastening 
the circuit system upon the polity of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 
United States, and the records of its working and results in the newer portions 
of the country, at the hands of Peter Cartwright and his compeers, are among 
the most alluring and stimulating in all religious history. "Riders" were from 
the new converts to Christ, thrust at once into circuit work, trained for their 
careers by assiduous study of the Bible, by the exercise of prayer, and by actual 
experience of continuous preaching, which was prosecuted, with little or no 
intermission, from Sunday morning until the next Sunday night, not seldom to the 



METHODIST CIRCUIT RIDER. 



401 



extent of three sermons each day and evening. The Rider met his Presiding Elder 
and his fellow-preachers of other circuits, at fixed seasons, to make and to hear 
reports of work, and, once a year, to receive or hear of new appointments ; he 
left behind him in almost every place where he got a hearing a Methodist "Class," 




ST. PATRICK S CATHLDKAL. 
(In this vino the spires are shown as they will he when complete | 



which kept the embers of religious faith and service more or less actively in 
glow until he came again. The matter and the method of his preaching were, 
for the most part, intended and adapted to move "the unconverted." His speec h 
was utterly without "enticing words of man's wisdom," nor was the "fear of 



402 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

man" at any time before his eyes in such degree as to rule him. In this last 
respect, if ever upon earth servants of Christ spoke "not as pleasing men, but 
God, who trieth the hearts," that was their way of speech. Generally these preach- 
ers met their "lions by the way." For the most part, the worldly-wise in society 
scorned them ; " lewd fellows of the baser sort " not only despised, but perse- 
cuted them, not infrequently to the extent of personal violence. Forbearing, 
however, to the verge of unlimited patience, the "Rider" endured their opposition 
with but little attempt at resistance ; although the instances are not wanting in 
which, if goaded to the quick, he demonstrated his standing in the Church Mili- 
tant by encountering the adversary upon his own ground and thrashing him by 
the arm of physical force. More than once in such case the adversary was 
afterwards found at the Rider's meetings, and was there led to the adoption of 
his faith and to entry upon his own kindred career. 

The work of these circuit preachers, moreover, was successful, tried by the 
most rigid standards. They did that which was given them to do with 
effectiveness, bringing men and women, from all classes, into the kingdom of 
Christ, and planting Methodist churches in every part of the land. That this 
work was performed with little pecuniary remuneration to the " Riders," * is a 
matter of secondary moment, save as it witnessed to the fervid zeal of those 
who wrought it. An American author, Edward Eggleston, in his book, " The 
Circuit Rider," has painted the facts of this Christian ministry in such guise as 
not only conserves them, but invests the record of this labor with graphic interest. 

In cursorily tracing the more prominent of the influences and agencies that 
have determined religious spirit and history in this country, inquiry as to 
individuals who have had especial part in its development, is alike pertinent 
and rewarding. Among men of the former generations who contributed to 
this, in the pulpit, and through the press, discriminating judgment long ago 
fixed upon Jonathan Edwards, the elder (i 703-1 758), as the greatest of all, 
in more directions than one. Whether Edwards be viewed as preacher, meta- 
physician, or theologian, his was a mind the equal of which has not often 
been given to the world. And this may be said, whether estimate be taken 
of his mental resources, as they were displayed in the work of his life, 
or rating be had of the influence his writings now exert in America and 
elsewhere. Extraordinary indeed must have been the preaching quality of 
a man about whose sermons it has lately been said, — " the traditions still 
linger in New England of the effect they produced. One man has recorded 
that as he listened to him discoursing of the Day of Judgment he fully 
anticipated that the dreadful day would begin when the sermon should come 



* Asbury's salary as Bishop was never more than $64 per annum, and $15 to $20 in cash, for the 
same period, was a fair stipend for the " Rider." 



GEORGE WHITEFIELD. 403 

to an end ! " He was the greatest preacher of his age. It is only at rare 
intervals that a man endowed with such a power appears. His effectiveness 
did not lie in voice or gesture. He was accustomed to lean, it is said, upon one 
arm, fastening his eyes upon some distant point in the meeting-house. But 
beneath the quiet manner were the fires of a volcano. His gravity of character, 
his profundity of spiritual insight, his intense realism, as if the ideal were the 
only real, his burning devotion, his vivid imagination, his masterful will, these 
entered into his sermons. He was like some organ of vast capacity, whose 
strongest stops or combinations should never have been drawn. The account 
•has been left to us of the impression he produced in the little village of .Enfield, 
in Connecticut, where he went to preach one Sunday morning, in the month of 
July, 1741. The congregation had assembled in its usual mood, with no special 
interest or expectation. The effect of the sermon was as if some supernatural 
apparition had frightened the people beyond control. They were convulsed in 
tears of agony and distress. Amid the tears and outcries, the preacher pauses, 
bidding them to be quiet, in order that he may be heard. This was the sermon 
which, if New England has forgiven, it has never been able to forget. Its title was, 
" Sinners in the hands of an angry God." The text was a weird passage from 
the book of Deuteronomy : — "their feet shall slide in due time."* 

Of the American ministry of George Whitefield (1714-1770) it' is unneces- 
sary to speak in detail. Born in England, he made seven visits to the American 
colonies, and the results of his Evangelistic tours were shared by the Congre- 
gational, the Presbyterian, and the Baptist churches, from Massachusetts to 
Georgia. He early became Calvinistic in his views, and association with 
Calvinistic divines in America deepened his convictions. His repute as perhaps 
the most marvelous and persuasive of modern pulpit orators fixes his place in 
religious history. His intense energy and devotion to his work were attested 
by the fact that he preached his last sermon at Exeter, N. H., although then ill, 
the day before he died. A friend remarked to him that he was more fit to go 
to bed than to preach. " Yes," said he ; then pausing, he added, "Lord, Jesus, 
I am weary in Thy work, but not of it." An immense audience gathered 
to hear him. At first he labored ; but soon all his faculties responded for a last 
great effort, and he held the multitude spellbound for two hours. He proceeded 
to Newburyport the same day. In the evening as he took his candle to go to 
bed, many who were gathered in the hall tempted him to an exhortation, which 
continued until the candle burned out in the socket. The next morning he was 
dead. His latest, and perhaps his best biographer is Tyerman : " Life of 
George Whitefield," London, 1876, 2 vols. 

Nathaniel Emmons, of Massachusetts (1 745-1 S40), was another of the lights 



^Jonathan Edwards: By A. V. G. Allen. Boston, 1890, pp. 126, 127. 



404 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of the New England Ministry. Both by his preaching and by his writings upon 
theology, he did much to shape the religious thought of his own and of succeed- 
ing time in New England. To these sources of his power is to be added his 
effective work as a private instructor of men for the ministry. His house at 
Franklin, in his native State, was a seminary, and the number of clergymen 
fitted by him for the pulpit is thought to have been nearly one hundred. 
The strong common-sense points of his system of theological thought have 
been so long incarnated in the so-called Orthodox preaching of our own day, 
that it is a strange sensation by virtue of which we may conceive of them as 
new in his generation. The distinctive Emmonsian points were as follows : — 
i. Holiness and sin consist in 
free voluntary exercises. 2. Men 
act freely under the Divine 
agency. 3 The least trans- 
gression of the Divine Law 
deserves eternal punishment. 
4. Right and Wrong are founded 
in the nature of things. 5. God 
exercises mere grace in pardon- 
ing or justifying penitent be- 




MORAVIAN EASTER SERVICE, BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA. 



lievers through the atonement of Christ, and mere goodness in rewarding them 
for their good works. 6. Notwithstanding the total depravity of sinners, God 
has a right to require them to turn from sin unto holiness. 7. Readers of the 
Gospel ought to exhort sinners to love God, repent of sin, and believe in Christ 
immediately. 8. Men are active, not passive in regeneration. 

Practically a disciple of Emmons in his theology, Lyman Beecher, of 
Connecticut (1775-1863), profoundly moved men in his career as minister and 
educator. Without doubt his most effective work was wrought in his renowned 
pastorates at Litchfield, Connecticut, and at Boston, Massachusetts. In Boston 
he encountered and antagonized the prevalent Unitarianism, dealing it heavy 



HENRY WARD BEECHER. 405 

blows by the strength of his intellect, the fervor of his heart, and the eloquence 
of his lips, in his defense of the "faith once delivered to the saints." His 
ministration in the same city, as well as at Litchfield, was marked by remarkable 
revivals of religion. His "Six Sermons on Intemperance," published in 1826, 
rang out as a trumpet blast, not only over the land, but were reprinted abroad 
in more languages than one, and have greatly promoted the temperance reform. 
He was, moreover, a theological student, and for twenty years was President 
and theological professor at Cincinnati, Ohio. His "Autobiography and 
Correspondence," edited by his son, Charles, was published in two volumes 
in 1865. 

His son, Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1889), was graduated at Amherst 
College, in 1834, and at Lane Theological Seminary, in Ohio, under his father's 
teaching and presidency, in 1837. He was pastor, successively, of the Presby- 
terian churches at Lawrenceburg and Indianapolis, Ind. (1837-1S46), and then 
of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, N. Y., — his ministry in his 
last pastorate dating from the founding of the church, in 1847, to his death. 
For many years he was the most widely known and the most popular preacher 
in America, — all the more so, it has justly been said, because of his unconven- 
tionalities. From the first he used his pulpit, as also his extended personal 
influence, for the promotion of social reforms, — notably as the center of the 
sharpest opposition to human slavery in the United States. His wit and humor 
were integral qualities, and had their pronounced place in his sermons, which 
were profoundly earnest, eloquent, imaginative, poetical. Rare and attractive 
personality was largely the source of his power, which was always thrown in 
the direction of freedom, whether of body or of mind. His influence in the 
Civil War of 1861-65 may fairly be reckoned as one of the stronger elements 
in the determination of the contest, Mr. Beecher's work in Great Britain in 
1863 contributing largely to the enlightenment of public opinion in that 
country concerning questions at issue in the struggle. The dissemination of 
his utterances by the public press added immensely to his repute. In 1848 he 
shared in establishing the New York Independent, of which he was, at the start, 
an associate editor, and from 1861 to 1863 > ts responsible editor. From 1870 
to 1880 he (nominally) edited The Christian Union. His books were numerous, 
that which manifests serious study being his " Life of Christ," left incomplete 
by its author. Without doubt the purpose of his ardent and laborious life 
was to bring men into fealty and attachment to Jesus Christ, and the tendency 
of his career as a religious teacher was to loosen the hold upon men of the older 
tenets of theological doctrine. 

The work of Charles Grandison Finney (1792- 1875), one of the most influen- 
tial of American ministers, falls under two heads, — that of revival preacher and 
theological instructor. In each of these relations his power was extraordinary. 



406 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



His logical force and rhetorical ability were such that it is fairly to be questioned 
if he have not precedence, among American clergy, as the leader of men of all 
classes to embrace a religious life. His appeals were taken to their consciences, 
rather than to their emotions, and made the conscience tremble and quake by 
the most searching analysis of the motives of the heart. During the last seven- 
teen years of his life he was instructor in theology, pastor, and college president 
at Oberlin, Ohio. The latest and most compact biography of Mr. Finney is that 
by Professor G. F. Wright, published in 1 891, but his "Autobiography" (New 
York, 1S76) will never be superseded, either as an interesting portraiture of the 
man, or as an interpretation of his life and work. 

It remains to indicate in brief the present standpoints in religious thought 
and activity of some of the leading Protestant denominations in the country. 

The Society of Friends, with George Fox, of 
England (1624-1690), as its founder, with one 
hundred and twenty thousand members in the 
United States, was divided in 1827 into two 
bodies, — the Evangelical or Orthodox, and the 
Liberal or Hicksite, — the last named now num- 
bering in the United States about 40,000. It has 
as its most marked peculiarity in doctrine, the 
belief in the immediate influence of the Holy 
Spirit of God, and its expectation of the guidance 
of the Spirit, in worship, and in all religious acts. 
This might degenerate into mysticism, were it 
not corrected by the Society's full recognition of 
the inspiration and authority of the Holy Scrip- 
tures. Quakerism, to use its older name, pro- 
vides that all its members shall receive a good 
practical education, and cherishes also the higher learning. It has colleges at 
Haverford, Pa., Richmond, Ind., Wilmington, O., Oskaloosa, la., and Swarth- 
more, Pa. (the last, Hicksite), and one for girls at Bryn Mawr, Pa. There are 
excellent boarding schools in most of the yearly meetings. The congregations 
are grouped together to constitute monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings ; 
of the last there are sixteen in America. 

It is estimated that the Regular or Calvinistic Baptists comprise about 
one-fourth of the Protestants of the United States. These Christians hold 
that the New Testament furnishes examples of, and enjoins the receipt as 
candidates for membership in the churches, only from among those who give 
credible evidence of their faith in Jesus Christ as their Saviour. And they 
insist, therefore, that only those candidates for baptism are to be accepted 
who are professed believers in Jesus. They have no authoritative creed, 





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OLD DUTCH CHURCH, NEW UTRECHT, 
LONG ISLAND. 



METHODISTS— CONGREG A Tf OX. I LISTS. 407 

and no ecclesiastical government beyond that of each church over its own 
members. The American Baptist Missionary Union (Boston, Mass.) is the 
Society through which the Baptists of the Northern States carry on their 
foreign missionary work. The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptists 
is also actively at work in Asia, Africa, Italy, South America, and Mexico. 
Both the Northern and Southern Baptists vigorously sustain home missionary 
operations. This denomination has also seven theological seminaries, with over 
four hundred students ; thirty-nine colleges, with more than forty-three hundred 
students, and seventy-five academies, with over ninety-two hundred students. 

The Methodist body in this country is at present divided into Methodist 
Episcopalian (North and South), Methodist Protestant, American Wesleyan, 
Free Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, and African M. E. Zion Churches. 
Its doctrine is Arminian as opposed to Calvinistic, and agrees in all essentials 
with the Wesleyan theology of Great Britain. There is scarcely anything 
distinctive in these articles, the design of John Wesley (1 703-1 791) being to 
prepare a broad platform upon which a body of Christian believers might stand 
and work in love. Their tenets may be found in Wesley's doctrinal sermons, 
his Notes on the New Testament, and in other writings which have come to be 
recognized as standards. Its Book Concern, started in 1 789 on a borrowed capital 
of $600, for the purpose of supplying its members with religious literature, had in 
1890 a net capital of $3,000,000, and during the previous forty years its sales 
had amounted to more than $45,000,000. Of its gains for 1890, $100,000 went to 
the support of superannuated preachers, and to the widows and orphans of 
deceased ministers. Its Missionary Society, domestic and foreign, organized 
in 18 19, besides caring for destitute people within the United States, supported 
missions, in the year 1890, in South America, Mexico, Africa, China, India, 
Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Bulgaria, and Italy. 
The fact that the Methodist Church in the United States is preeminently the 
Church of the common people, has been noted, although this merit is shared by 
the Baptist churches of the country. 

The Congregational form of church life in the United States, in its latest 
development, takes its name from the prominence which it gives to the congre- 
gation of believers, holding that any local company of Christian people con- 
federated by mutual agreement and by covenant with God, is a Christian church ; 
which, through such organization, enters a great sisterhood of equal churches 
of like faith and order, — and every such church governs itself, under the guidance 
of God's Holy Spirit, according to its understanding of the Holy Scriptures. 
" As a church polity the system has two fundamental principles ; on the one 
hand the independence of every such local church of all outward control, save 
that of its Great Head ; and on the other hand its obligation to live in sisterly rela- 
tion with every other, taking and giving counsel and friendly aid as need requires, 



4oS 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



and working with all others for the glory of God in the redemption of men. 

By its spirit and its history it is closely associated with the prosecution of 

missions at home and abroad, and 
with the promotion of secular edu- 
cation. At the present time it has 
in the country, seven theological 
seminaries, and for the last five 
.rs its statistics show a net annual 




1MMTI.J. <>F REV. STEPHEN UUKUOUGHS. 



gain of nearly 1 12 churches, with almost 16,000 members, per annum. 

All the Presbyterian churches of the country are understood to hold, in 
doctrine, to the supreme headship of Jesus Christ; involving submission to His 



ROMAN ( ATHOLICS. 409 

law contained in the Christian Scriptures as the only rule oi practice; the parity 
of the ministry,as ambassadors oi the Supreme I lead of the Church ; participa- 
tion of the people in the government oi the Church through officers chosen by 
them; the unity of the Church involving an authoritative control, not by indi 
vidual, but by representative courts. In its General Assembly (Northern) "I 
[890, a movement was inaugurated lor the revision of its doctrinal standards, 
looking toward softening some ol their more rigid Calvinistic features, but the 
polity and the spirit of this body of Christian believers is strongly adverse to 
haste in changes that have any bearingupon fundamentals in faith and practice. 

This Church has been, and is to day, the consistent and persistent advocate 
and promoter of Christian Missions in America and over the world, and the body 
of its membership has always been found, as it may be found to-day, anion;; tin 
most intelligent and influential men and women in the land. Their zeal and 
effort for the public welfare is always awake, and is always put forth alike for 
the establishment and the upholding oi piety, righteousness, and good order in 
the State. 

Outward development in the Protestant Episcopal churches of the United 
States has gone forward, ol late years, in a swift ratio of increase, which promises 
well for the future of this, the oldest of the Protestant bodies in America. The 
new era in its growth and extension dates from 1 S 3 5 , when it awoke to the 
importance of domestic missions, enlarging and reconstituting its Missionary 
Hoard. In the light of recent occurrences it may be questioned whether loyaltj 
to its doctrinal system be as emphatically insisted upon, as at some periods in the 
past, but the doctrinal flux and reflux which appears in some dioceses may be 
observed in other communions of Christians, and has ordinarily been a feature 
of general ecclesiastical development throughout the world's history. Its 
Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society was founded in iSjo, and missions 
an- now sustained by it in Mexico, Africa, China, and |apan. There are some 
twenty-five colleges and theological seminaries. 

Of the Roman Catholic organization in this country, — with this peculiarity, 
that, among all bodies ol American Christians, it alone acknowledges the spiritual 
headship of an official not only a foreigner by birth, but permanently resident 
abroad, — it is correct to say that the fundamental doctrine of its system is the 
Church, so defined as to identify it with the visible church, distinguished by the 
government ol the hierarchy or priesthood, and the administration of the sai ra 
ments. The Church, moreover is infallible. Therefore, Holy Scripture and tra- 
dition are put by it upon the same level. Through the Church, among true 
I atholics, men gain a "sense" for truth, and hence in the Church men under- 
stand the Scriptures and the truth, as is impossible without. The Bible thus 
becomes but a portion of the complex of Church teaching, which hears with it the 
authority ol God. !n doctrine, the Roman ( hurch teaches that justification of 



4io 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



sinners is the making men righteous, not declaring them to be so ; justification 

by faith being rejected, and .„ : '-:r ; 

the necessity of good 
works to salvation being 
emphasized. The sacra- 
ments of the Church, more- 
over, are the means of »,: ! 
the conferment of divine ^~.. 
grace, and "alwavs and 'iT^'A , 




THE RECANTATION OF JUDGE 
SEWALL. 

to all convey the 
grace," when they are 
administered. 

The Unitarian 
school of religious 
thought has been 
known in the United 
States, as elsewhere, 
for its opposition to 
Trinitarianism (popu- 
larly known as the doctrine of three persons in one God) in the steady assertion 



UNITARIANS. 411 

and maintenance of the unity of the Divine existence. Rev. Dr. Joseph Priestley 
(1773-1804), one of its earlier and abler advocates, came to Philadelphia from 
England in 1792. The general form of doctrine which he preached, rested, in his 
contention, upon the basis of the Holy Scriptures as an inspired and final authority, 
but its interpretations of religion were greatly influenced by the philosophy of John 
Locke ( 1 632-1 704). Before Priestley reached this country, however, the first 
Episcopal church in New England (at Boston, Mass.), had become the first 
distinctively Unitarian church in America — Rev. James Freeman (1 759-1 835), 
the first minister in the United States who assumed the Unitarian name, being 
ordained their Rector in November, 1 787. Under him all reference to the Trinity 
was struck out from the book of Common Prayer. When Rev. Henry Ware, 
of Hingham, Mass., a decided Arminian and Unitarian, was elected (1805) to the 
Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard College, Mass., controversy broke 
out in New England, which was prosecuted with vigor for many years. Rev. Dr. 
William Ellery Channing (1 780-1 842) was the most distinguished leader and 
representative of Unitarianism in this discussion. Under his guidance the 
rational and ethical movement which he urged had a theology based upon a 
free interpretation of the New Testament, accepting the Bible as inspired in a 
special sense, and appealing to miracles in attestation of the claims of Christianity. 
Semi-Arian views of the nature and rank of Jesus prevailed. The doctrine of 
the Trinity was treated as metaphysical speculation. The Evangelical theory 
of the Atonement was exchanged for one exhibiting the moral example of Jesus. 
Later on, the dogma of everlasting punishment was abandoned. Under the 
diffusion of German thought, the rise of transcendentalism and the influence of 
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1S03-18S2) and Theodore Parker (1 8 10-1860), Unitarian- 
ism has passed through important transitions, having ceased to appeal primarily to 
the Scripture text, and recognizing the Bible rather as a body ot sacred literature. 
"It turns less to tradition and more to the individual reason and conscience; it 
has ceased to refer to miracles for the evidence of Christianity. Truth, it affirms, 
furnishes its own verification. Arian views of Jesus have gradually given place 
to those distinctly humanitarian. Sympathetic in its attitude toward science, 
Unitarianism was among the first forms of Christianity to welcome the philosophy 
of evolution. It has been hospitable to studies in comparative mythology and 
comparative religion. Under these influences there is perhaps more uniformity 
of doctrine and belief among Unitarians to-day than ever before. Christianity 
is regarded less as a special revelation from God and more as a manilestation of 
the one great religion."* The American Unitarian Association was organized at 
Boston, Mass., in 1825. The next, bearing distinctively the Unitarian name, was 
the Western Unitarian Conference, organized at Cincinnati, O., in 1852. The 

* S. J. Barrows in " Concise Dictionary of Religious Knowledge," p. 934. 



412 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian churches was formed in 
New York city in 1865. Since the close of the Civil War (1861-65) no less than 
thirty conferences of churches of this denomination have been established in the 
country, and fifteen other organizations — educational, philanthropic, or missionary 
in character, — making nearly fifty associations which have sprung from the 
cooperative work of Unitarian churches (of which there are now about four 
hundred in the United States) in the last twenty-five years. There is a denomi- 
national theological school at Meadville, Pa. 

It is confidently asserted that the "Book of Mormon," the basis of "The 
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints," in the Territory of Utah, where the 
Mormons settled in 1847, is, in its authorship, the production of some divine of 
the "Disciple" persuasion — an adherent of Mr. Alexander Campbell, founder 
of the " Campbellites," who was born in Ireland in 1778 and died in West 
Virginia (U. S. A.) in 1866. But all authorities agree that Joseph Smith, of 
New York (1 805-1 844), Mormon founder and prophet, obtained possession of 
the book, September 22, 1827. The doctrine and covenants of this organization 
are to be found in the third Sacred Book of the Mormon Church. The marvels 
of its propagandism in various parts of the world have never been surpassed. 
Their results have demonstrated, among other things, however, that little can be 
accomplished by Mormon missionaries except in Protestant countries. England, 
Wales, Scotland, British India, Ceylon, British Guiana, the Cape of Good Hope, 
the West Indies, Canada, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Malta, Gibraltar, 
France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Scandinavia, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, 
Mexico, Chili, China and Siam, the Sandwich Islands, the Society Islands, and, 
Jerusalem have all been the theatres for the labors of the courageous preachers 
of this sect. Its comparatively recent dismissal of the doctrine of polygamy from 
its revelations of the Divine Will, be it reality or pretense, strengthens the hope 
that this Protestant cancer is to be eliminated from the American body politic 
at no distant day. The population of the Territorv, in 1890, was 207,905, and 
the Governor of Utah is authority for the statement that the proportion between 
Mormon and Gentile voters in the Territory was seven to five. This Gentile 
preponderance is another element which goes toward the solution of the 
Mormon problem. The " Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day 
Saints," which had its first conference in 1852, and now has headquarters, with 
a large publishing house, at Lamoni, la., which at that conference disowned the 
leadership o( the Mormon officials in Utah, must also help toward this issue. In 
1890 it had a total membership in the United States of 21,773, in thirty-six 
States and three Territories, including that of Utah. It accepts three books as 
of divine origin : " First, the Bible ; second, the Book of Mormon ; third, the Book 
of Covenants. The latter consists of the revelations given to the Church in the 
present century as a guide in church government. The Book of Mormon is 



CONCLUSION. 413 

accepted as a history ot the ancient inhabitants of America and the revelation 
given them by God, beginning at a period 2000 years before Christ and continu- 
ing until 400 years after Christ. In doctrine they adhere to the Trinity, to the 
atonement by Jesus Christ, to the resurrection of the dead, to the second coming 
of Christ, and to the Eternal Judgment, believing that each individual will receive 
reward or punishment, in strict measure, according to the good or evil deeds done 
in life. They hold that men are to be saved by faith in God and Christ, by 
forsaking sin, by immersion for the remission of sin, and by the laying on of 
hands. They believe that revelations of God are still given by the Holy Spirit 
for the guidance of the Church, and that the gifts, blessings, and powers of the 
Holy Spirit in Bible times are continual. Their order of church government is 
such as they find authority for in the New Testament, and such as they under- 
stand that the apostolic Church observed. It includes the presidency, consisting, 
when full, of three persons, which is given jurisdiction over the whole Church as 
its chief presiding authority ; twelve apostles, whose special duty is to take charge 
of all missionary work abroad ; one or more quorums of seventy, who are set 
apart from the body of elders and assist the apostles ; high priests who have 
charge over States and districts ; priests or pastors, teachers and deacons and 
bishops, of whom three are set at the head of the business affairs of the Church. 
Other bishops and agents assist in collecting the tithes. As to marriage, they 
believe that it is ordained of God, and that there should be but one companion 
for man or woman in wedlock, until the contract is broken by death or trans- 
gression. They characterize the doctrine of polygamy, or plural wives, as an 
abomination." : ' : 

The reader who has carefully weighed the statements of this chapter 
must conclude that the growth of religious life which has marked the first 
two and a half centuries of history in the United States compels its own 
recognition by the student of that history, as imperatively as does the advance- 
ment of the country in any feature of its development. If, in the nature of 
the case, its successive phases have had less instant, and at times less startling 
impressiveness, they have not been the less real, less influential, or less 
susceptible of estimate. Religious sentiment, not to say religious principle, has 
a deeper hold upon the American people, to-day, than it has ever had. The 
Churches that are its exponents hold still more and wider power, and are always 
to be reckoned with in the administration of public affairs. The time has passed, 
if it ever existed, when public men in the United States venture, by policy or by 
measure, to affront, for long, this religious sense of their constituents. It is in 
place to add that, besides the growing persuasion of that absolute equality of 

* From the Bulletin of Church Statistics, U. S. Census of 1S90. 



414 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



religious relations among individuals in the nation which was a principle in the 
genius of the old Hebrew Commonwealth, the three most significant aspects of 
American religious development, in 1892, are the accelerating progress of our 
Christian Churches toward catholicity of spirit, — their steadily awakening zeal in 
effort for the welfare of the poorer classes in society, — and the organized agency 
of woman in the religious and benevolent activities which are the charm and 
glory of our civilization. 



! 




PASSOVER SUPPER, AS OBSERVED BY THE JEWS IN NEW YORK IN IS92. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



THE PEOPLE UNDER NEW CONDITIONS. 




| .,'; . ODERN democracy is often looked upon as something 
w &>- peculiarly secular, unreligious, or even irreligious in its origin. 
.* , .''fir' In truth, however, it has its origin in religious aspirations quite 

as much as modern art, or architecture, or literature. To the 
theology of Calvin, the founder of the Republic of Geneva, 
grafted upon the sturdy independence of English and Scotch 
middle classes, our American democracy owes its birth. James 
I well appreciated that the principles of uncompromising 
Protestantism were as incompatible with monarchy as with the hierarchy which 
they swept aside. Each man by this theology was brought into direct personal 
responsibility to his God, without the intervention of priest, bishop, or Pope, and 
without any allegiance to his king except so far as it agreed with his allegiance 
to the King of kings. Macaulay has struck this note of Puritan republicanism 
when he says that the Puritans regarded themselves as " Kings by the right of 
an earlier creation ; priests by the interposition of an Almighty hand." As 
John Fiske says, James Stuart always treasured up in his memory the day 
when a Puritan preacher caught him by the sleeve and called him " God's silly 
vassal." "A Scotch Presbytery," he cried, "agreed as well with monarchy as 
God and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at 
their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings ! " 

But the democracy which was founded in New England as the logical 
outcome of the religious principles tor which the Puritans left < >ld England 
was not democracy as we know it to-day. The Puritans for the most part 
believed in divinely appointed rulers as much as the monarchs against whom 
they rebelled ; but the divinely appointed rulers were the "elect of God" — 
those who believed as they did, and joined with their organizations to establish 
His kingdom on earth. For this reason we find the Massachusetts Colony as 
early as 1631 decided that "No man shall be admitted to the freedom of this 
body politic but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits 
of the same." The government, in short, was simply a democratic theocracy, and 

4' 5 



4 i6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

as the colony grew in numbers, the power came to be lodged in the hands of the 
minority. There were, however, among the clergy of Massachusetts men who 
believed in democracy as we understand it to-day. Alexander Johnson in his 
history of Connecticut says with truth that Thomas Hooker, who led from 
Massachusetts into Connecticut the colony which established itself at Hartford, 
laid down the principle upon which the American nation long generations after 
was to be established. When Governor Winthrop, in a letter to Hooker, defended 
the restriction of the suffrage on the ground that "the best part is always the 
least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser," the learned and 
generous-hearted pastor replied: "In matters which concern the common good, 
a general council, chosen by all to transact business which concerns all, I 
conceive most suitable to rule, and most safe for relief of the whole." The 
principles of our republicanism were never better stated until Lincoln in his 
oration at Gettysburg made his appeal that this nation might be consecrated 
anew in the fulfillment of its mission, and that government " from the people, 
for the people, by the people," might not perish from the earth. Both Hooker 
and Lincoln had a supreme belief in the wisdom of the plain people in much of 
the matters which affect their own lives. The rank and file of the people have 
the surest instinct as to what will benefit or injure the rank and file of the 
people, and when upon them is placed the responsibility of determining what 
their government shall be, they are educated for self-government. In the 
colony which Thomas Hooker founded upon these principles there was found at 
the time of the Revolution more political wisdom, more genius for self-govern- 
ment, and more devotion to the patriotic cause than in any other of the thirteen 
colonies. 

At the time of the Revolution, however, there was another democracy 
besides that of New England, which enabled the colonies successfully to resist 
the Government of George III. It was the democracy of the planters of the 
South. The democracy of the Southern colonies was not like that in New 
England, the democracy of collective self-government, but the democracy of 
individual self-government, or, rather, of individual self-assertion. In fact, it 
would hardly be too much to say that many of the Virginia planters who espoused 
so warmly and fought so bravely in the cause of liberty were not inspired by 
the spirit of democracy at all, but rather by the spirit of an aristocracy which 
could brook no control. These Southern planters were the aristocrats of the 
American Revolution. In New York city, and even in Boston and Philadelphia, 
the wealthiest merchants were strongly Tory in their sympathies. In New York 
it was affirmed by General Greene that two-thirds of the land belonged to men 
in sympathy with the English and out of sympathy with their fellow country- 
men. In these cities it was the plain people and the poorer classes who furnished 
most of the uncompromising patriots, but in the South men of fortune risked 






k. ' 







4 i 8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

their fortunes in the cause of independence. These men were slave owners, 
and the habit of mastery made them fiercely rebellious when George III 
attempted in any way to tyrannize over them. Many of them were the 
descendants of the English nobility, and as such they acknowledged no 
superiors. Naturally, then, in the struggle for liberty they furnished the leaders 
of the colonists, both North and South, and the agricultural classes, whether 
rich or poor, were naturally on the side of self-government, for their isolation 
had from the first compelled them to be self-governing. 

Such, then, was American democracy at the outbreak of the Revolution. 
It had but one fundamental weakness — there was no external bond of union 
between the colonies to enable them to act in concert and vigorously. This 
was the point at which the democracies of ancient Greece had broken down, 
and the democracies of America seemed for a time in peril of sharing their fate. 
Each colony had been independent of its neighbors, and united with them only 
through their common allegiance to Great Britain. It must be remembered that 
in those days it was a seven days' journey from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, 
within the same Commonwealth, so that parts of a single colony were more 
widely separated than Massachusetts and California are to-day. There was but 
little commerce between them, and not for half a century were the iron ties of 
the railroads to begin to join them together. That colonies thus separated 
should have been able to join together and act as unitedly as they did, brings 
out better than anything else in history the superiority of the political genius 
of the Anglo-Saxon race to that of the ancient Greeks. Our colonists were 
able to look beyond their own neighborhoods, their own colonies, and see the 
common tie of common liberty and common interests which bound them 
together from Maine to Georgia. It was this tie of federation, which centuries 
of experience had ingrained upon the English-speaking peoples, which enabled 
the American colonists to win against a power far greater in comparison with 
their own than that with which Philip of Macedon destroyed the republics of 
Southern Greece. 

Even during the War, however, the National spirit was not strongly enough 
developed to compel the individual colonies to bear the taxation necessary for 
the support of our armies. It was for this reason that the issuing of paper 
money was almost the one resource of the Continental Congress. When the 
War was over and the sense of common danger no longer held the colonies 
together, the American Nation seemed almost to have ceased to exist. The 
enactments of the Federal Congress were simply recommendations which each 
colony could accept or not as it pleased, and it rarely pleased. The evils due 
to this disintegration have generally been exaggerated in our popular histories. 
for die reason that our greatest weakness was at the point at which all other 
nations concentrated their greatest strength. The National army was reduced 



THE NECESSITY OF FEDERATION. 



419 



to a corporal's guard, the National navy to nothing. Foreign powers refused to 
enter into treaties with us, because there was no central authority to which all of 
the States were bound to be subservient. When, however, we turn to the 
condition of the people in the various States, the prosperity of agriculture, and 
the growth of cities, there was no such National decay as the outer emblems of 
National power seemed to indicate. It was for this reason that when the fed 
eral Constitution was proposed so large a part of the people in most of the 
States were slow to accept it. Its acceptance, however, was inevitable. With- 




lii II BETWEEN BURR AND HAMILTON. 



out it we would not only have failed to preserve a solid front toward other 
nations, but were in danger of internal complications and even wars among 
ourselves. The different States had begun to enact legislation antagonistic to 
each other, and this of course always called forth prompt retaliation. The City 
of New York had already enacted that the farmers of Connecticut and New 
Jersey could not bring supplies into the New York market without the payment 
of a tax upon them, and the market boats from what is now Jersey City had to 
pay entrance fees and obtain clearances at the Custom House, just like ships 



4 2o THE STORY OF AMERICA, 

from London and Hamburg. Connecticut firewood could not be delivered to the 
householder in New York without the payment of a heavy duty. New Jersey 
and Connecticut were quick to resent the injustice and the injury, and the 
business men of New London agreed, under penalty of $250 for the first offence, 
not to send any goods whatever into New York for a period of one year ; while 
New Jersey gave vent to its indignation by levying a tax of $1800 upon a small 
patch of ground on Sandy Hook on which the City of New York had built a 
light-house. Such bickerings as these were certain soon to have destroyed 
National spirit and to have resulted in giving us thirteen nations instead of one, 
and thirteen more or less hostile to each other and helpless in the presence of a 
foreign enemy. There was again danger that the democracies of this country 
would fall as did the democracies of Greece, but finally, through the sense 
of unity which came from a common mother country, common environment, 
common institutions, and now a common history, aided by the Anglo-Saxon 
genius for co-operation, a union was established under the Federal Constitution. 

The first half century of our political history consisted rather in the devel- 
opment of the political rights of the individual citizen than of the loyalty which 
all owed to the American nation. Nothing is so difficult as to keep in mind 
that the government of the colonies at the close of the Revolution was not what 
it is to-day, and that democracy as we know it was regarded as the dream of 
theorists. Some of the members of the Federal Convention deeply distrusted 
the common people. Flbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, declared that " The 
people do not want suffrage, but are the dupes of pretended patriots," and those 
who were at all in sympathy with him prevented, as they imagined, the election 
of the President by the people themselves, and did prevent the election ot the 
United States Senators by the people. Some of them were even opposed to 
the election of the House of Representatives directly by the people, but fortu- 
nately, even Hamilton sided with Madison and Mason, when they urged that 
our House of Commons ought to have at heart the rights and interests of every 
class of people, and be bound, by the manner of their election, to be the repre- 
sentatives of every class of people. But by " every class of people " the framers 
of the Constitution from the more conservative of the States meant simply 
every class of freeholders. 

In Virginia none could vote except those who owned fifty acres of land. In 
New York, to vote for Governor or State Senator, a freehold worth $250 clear 
of mortgage was necessary, and to vote for Assemblymen a freehold of $50 or 
the payment of a yearly rent of $10 was necessary. Even Thomas Jefferson, 
who was the democratic philosopher of the Revolutionary period, did not 
strenuously insist that the suffrage must be universal, and it was not for a half 
century that it became universal, even among the whites. In the State of New 
York these restrictions existed until the adoption of the Constitution of 1S21, 



THE QUESTION OF SUFFRAGE. 



421 



and even this Constitution merely reduced the privileges of land owners. 
Old Chancellor Kent, the author of " Kent's Commentaries," declared in this 
Convention that he would not "bow before the idol of universal suffrage," the 
theory which he said had " been regarded with terror by the wise men of 
every age," and whenever tried had brought "corruption, injustice, violence, 
and tyranny." "If universal suffrage were adopted," he declared, "posterity 
would deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day." The horrors of 
the French Revolution were always held up by conservatives to show that the 



,-■1 




EXECUTION OF HETHERINGTON AND BRACE AT Till HEADQUARTERS OF THE COMMITTEE, CALLED 

" FORT VIGILANCE." 

[This building was also called "Fort Gunnybags," from the material of the breastworks in front of it. On the roof were cannon and 

sentinels, and the alarm bell of the committee.] 

people could not be trusted, and the learned author of the "Commentaries," 
which every lawyer has pored over, saw in prophetic vision that, if universal 
suffrage should be adopted, "The radicals of England, with the force of 
that mighty engine, would sweep away the property, the laws, and the people 
of that island like a deluge." Not until between 1840 and 1850 did universal 
suffrage among the whites come to be accepted in the older States. 

During the first half century of our history it was the Democratic party, the 
party of Jefferson, which was on the side of these extensions of popular rights. 



422 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The principle of this party was that each State ought to legislate for itself, with 
the least possible control from the central government; that each locality ought 
to have its freedom of local government extended ; and that each individual 
should be self-governing, with the same rights and privileges for all. As regards 
foreign affairs, it was characterized by a "passion for peace," and an abiding 
hostility toward a costly army and navy. [efferson believed that the way to 
avoid wars, and the way to be strong, should war become inevitable, was by the 
devotion of the people to productive industry, and not by burdening them to 
rival the powers of Europe in the strength of their armaments. In the year 
1800, the party which rallied to his support — then called the Republican 
party, but generally spoken of as the Democratic party — triumphed over the 

federalists. 

In New England alone did Federalism remain strong at the close of 
Jefferson's first administration. In that section the calvinistic clergy, who had 
done so much for the establishment of American democracy, fought fiercely 
against its extension. Jefferson's followers demanded the separation of Church 
and State and the abolition of the religious qualifications for office holding, 
which were then almost as general as property qualifications. He was known to 
be in sympathy with the French revolution, and was therefore denounced as a 
Jacobin, both in religion and in politics. We cannot wonder, therefore, that in 
the section in which the clergy were the real rulers, Jeftersonian democracy was 
regarded with hatred and contempt. Vermont alone, among the New England 
States, was from the first thoroughly democratic, and this was because in 
Vermont there was no established aristocracy, either of education or wealth. 
In Connecticut, which under clerical leadership had once been the stronghold 
of advanced democracy, we find President Dwight expressing a common 
sentiment, not only of the clergy but of the educated classes generally, when 
he declared that "the great object of Jacobinism, both in its political and moral 
revolution, is to destroy every trace of civilization in the world." " In the 
triumph of Jeffersonianism," he said, "we have now reached a consummation* of 
democratic blessings ; we have a country governed by blockheads and knaves." 

But the ideas which in New England were at first received only by the 
po6r and the ignorant, were in the very air which Americans breathed. The new T 
States which were organized at the West were aggressively democratic from 
the outset. In the Northwest Territory the inequalities against which Jeftersonian 
democracy protested never gained a foothold. In this, which was made a State 
during [efferson's first administration, the union of Church and State was not 
thought of, and no religious qualification whatever for the office of Governor 
was exacted. Property qualifications were almost as completely set aside. 
While in some of the older States the Governor had to possess ^"5000, and 
even ,£10,000, Ohio's Governor was simply required to be a resident and an 



PRIM0GEN1TL RE AP.ROGA TED. 



423 



owner of land. As regards inheritances, the English law of primogeniture, 
which remained unaltered in some of the older States, and in New England 
generally took the form of a double portion to the oldest son, was completely 




A LABOR 1 1 N.l 



set aside, and all children of the same parents became entitled to the same 
rights. I hat Ohio thus led the way in the democratic advance was due to the 
fact that its constitution was framed when these ideas had already become 



424 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ascendant in the hearts of the people, and the failure of the clergy of New 
England was due to their trying to keep alive institutions which were the off- 
spring of another age, and could not long survive it. 

For its distrust of the new democracy New England Federalism paid 
heavily in the isolation, defeat, and destruction which shortly awaited it. When 
the new democratic administration had fully reduced Federal taxation and shown 
its capacity for government, the more liberal-minded of the Federalists went 
over to the Democrats. Even Massachusetts gave a majority for Jefferson in 
1804, and when the extreme Federalists became more extreme through the loss 
of their Liberal contingent, and called the Hartford Convention, in 1808, 
Federalism died of its own excesses. The policy of the Democratic Adminis- 
tration toward England may not have been wise, but the proposal of secession 
in order to resist it made Federalism almost synonymous with toryism and 
disloyalty. 

For a number of years after the war of 181 2, there was really only one 
political party in the United States. In 1824, when the contest was so close 
between Jackson, Adams and Clay, each of these contestants was a 
" Democratic Republican," and it would have been hard to tell what 
questions of policy divided their followers, though Jackson's followers, as a rule, 
cared most for the extension of the political rights of the poorer classes, and 
cared least for the policy of protection which the war had made an important 
issue by cutting off commerce, and thus calling into being extensive manufactur- 
ing interests. That the followers of Clay finally voted for Adams may have 
been due to sympathy upon this question of the tariff. In 1828 something akin 
to party lines were drawn upon the question of the National Bank, and the 
victory of Jackson provoked the hostility of the masses toward that institution, 
which certainly enriched its stockholders to such an extent as to make them a 
favored class. The Tariff Act, passed in 1828, made the tariff question hence- 
forth the dividing question in our national politics until slavery took its place. 
Most of the absolute free-traders were supporters of Jackson, but when South 
Carolina passed its Nullification Act as a protest against the "tariff of abomi- 
nations," as it was called, President Jackson promptly declared that "the 
Union must and shall be preserved," and forced the recalcitrant State to renew 
its allegiance to the National Government. By the end of Jackson's adminis- 
tration there were again two distinct parties in the United States — the one 
advocating a high tariff" and extensive National improvements by the Federal 
Goa ernment, and the other advocating a low tariff and the restriction of National 
expenditures to the lowest possible limit. The former party — the Whig — was, 
of course, in favor of a literal construction of the Constitution and the extension 
of powers to the National Government, while the latter advocated "strict 
construction" and "State riohts." 



THE EVOLUTION OF POLITICS AND PARTIES. 



425 



Jackson belonged to the latter party, and in 1S36 was able to transfer 
the succession to Van Buren. But in 1840 the Whigs swept the country, 
electing Harrison and Tyler, after the most picturesque campaign ever fought 
in America. All the financial ills from which the country was suffering were for 
the time attributed to Van Buren's economic policy, and his alleged extrava- 
gance at the White House enabled the 
Whigs to arouse the enthusiasm of the 
poor for their candidate, who lived in a 
log cabin, and drank hard cider. During 
the next four years, however, there 
was a reaction, and in 1844 Polk ; 
was elected upon the plat- ■ 
form on which 
V 
had 




AKI:11KA11"N. 



is true that in Pennsylvania the Democratic campaign cry was, " Polk, Dallas 
and the tariff of '42," which was a high tariff, but in most of the country 
Democracy meant " Free trade and Sailors' rights." 

From this time on, the Whig party grew weaker and the Democratic party 
stronger. It is true that the Whigs elected General Taylor in 1S48. The 



426 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

revenue tariff law passed by the Democrats in 1846 was not changed until the 
still lower tariff of 1857 was enacted. In 18$ 2 the Whig party was hardly 
stronger than the old Federalist party at the close of Jefferson's first term. 
But just as the Democratic party, became able to boast of its strength a new 
party came into being which adopted the principles of the free-soil wing of the 
old Democratic party, and in its second national campaign elected Abraham 
Lincoln to the presidency. In this readjustment of parties the pro-slavery 
Whigs went over to the Democrats and the anti-slavery Democrats went over 
to the Republicans. The bolting Democrats claimed, with truth, to follow the 
principles of their party from the time of Jefferson down, but the party as a 
whole followed the interests of its most powerful element instead of the princi- 
ples of its founder. In the States from Ohio west, where upon economic 
questions the Democratic party had swept everything by increasing majorities 
since 1S40, the bolting element was so great that all of these States were 
landed in the Republican column. One great Church — the Methodist — which 
before had been, as a rule, Democratic in politics now became solidly Republican. 

As the war went on the Republican party became more and more loyally 
attached to the principles of liberty. It is events which educate, and the hard 
tight the slave owners made for the perpetuation of their institution educated 
the north to desire its abolition. The victory of the Secessionists at Bull Run 
turned out to be their greatest calamity. Had they been defeated there the 
Union would have been restored and slavery maintained. 

In emancipating the slaves, Lincoln, as he himself said, did not "claim 
to have controlled events, but to have been controlled by them." It was 
impossible to put down the rebellion without emancipating the slaves, and 
therefore they were emancipated. When the slaves had been given liberty, 
they were given the ballot with which to maintain it. The immediate results 
of this are still the subject of hot contention, but no one who has watched 
the eagerness of the southern negro for education, nor the liberality with 
which the southern whites are now furnishing it, can fail to recognize that 
the possession of the ballot has been a protection to the negroes, and a source 
of advani ement in all things which fit men for citizenship. 

The history of American politics up to the time of the introduction of the 
new economic questions by the labor unions in the Eart, and the tanner's 
unions in the West and South, has been the history of the gradual extension of 
political rights. The Federalist party gave us the Constitution ; the old Demo- 
cratic party gave us white manhood suffrage ; the Republican party gave us 
universal suffrage. The glory of America's past is that she has been continu- 
ally progressing; that she has proven to the world the capacity of the whole 
people for self-government. 



-u 




CHAPTER XXIII. 

GOLD AND SILVER MINING 

HE epoch of adventure which Bret Harte has exhibited through 
rfPo the stained glass of his romances, is not less full of color when 
seen through the clear air of history. In fact, it has more 
color, for there is less monotony of hue. California was the 
scene of daring and often grotesque adventure even before the 
discovery of gold. The explorations of Lieutenant Fremont, 
described by him in a vividly truthful report which called the 
attention of the nation to this new land, will do as much for the enduring 
fame of "The Pathfinder" as his leadership of the Republican party in its 
first great national campaign. These explorations made the possession of 
California a point most worth fighting for in the war with Mexico. The 
methods by which we obtained it were not entirely consistent with our boasted 
character as the most just and peace-loving nation of the world ; but the part 
played in it by the American pioneers who settled in California exhibits our 
strongest national traits, both good and bad, in a scene half heroic, half comic, 
which will never be forgotten. The American pioneers though far outnumbered 
by the Spaniards, found not the slightest difficulty in overthrowing their rulers 
and establishing the Bear-Hag Republic. In the words of Dr. Semple, one of 
their leaders, they "borrowed" supplies on the faith of the Bear-flag Govern- 
ment, assured that " their children in generations yet to come will look back 
with pleasure upon the commencement of a revolution carried on by their 
fathers upon principles high and holy as the laws of eternal justice" Another 
of the leaders of the revolutionists crowded the citizens of the captured town 
of Sonora between the four walls of their " calaboose," and there read to them a 
proclamation explaining that "though he had for the moment deprived them of 
the liberty which is the right and privilege of all good and just men, it was only 
that they might become acquainted with his unalterable purpose to establish a 
government based upon the common rights of all men." All their proceedings, 
however, were brimful of the American spirit, and showed how the pioneers 
were inspired by a purpose which made a handful of them more than a match 
for the organized forces in guard of the Mexican province. The conquest of 

4^7 



4 2S 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



California in this war simply prevented the peaceful annexation of the territory 
to our nation a year or so later. The American pioneers who poured in and 
developed the country had the might and the right to govern it, and the 
nation gained nothing which its children prize by violating its best instincts 
in acting the part of a bully toward our weaker Southern neighbor. 

With the dis- 
covery of gold, how- 
ever, California 
suddenly became a 
theatre toward 
which the eyes of 
the whole world 
were turned. The 
discovery was 
made by James 
Wilson Marshal, in 
January, 1848. 
Marshal had been 
employed to con- 
struct a mill on the 
estate of a hundred 
square miles which 
General John A. 
Sutter had received 
as a grant from the 
Spanish Govern- 
ment. Sutter's 
demesne had been 
the centre of the 
American colonies 
in California. Gen- 
eral Sutter himself, 
a Swiss by birth, 
was a generous- 
minded visionary, 
who had shown 
himself so hospitable to all American immigrants, that he had attained to a 
certain pre-eminence in the affairs of the Territory, and was looked upon by 
many as a great and heroic figure. Up to the time of the discovery of gold 
upon his land, his fortunes had steadily mounted upward ; from that time they 
went down, down. Marshal was an American by birth, born in a country town 




CLEARING UP UNDER-CURRENTS. 



. DISCOVERY OF GOLD. 429 

in New Jersey. He, too, was a courageous and kindly visionary, though some- 
times he was aroused from his accustomed dreaminess into tierce action. His 
fortunes also became worse after his great discovery, and during his later life 
he was somewhat embittered by what he believed to be the injustice and neglect 
of his countrymen. "The enterprising energy of which the orators and editors 
of California's early golden days boasted so much, as belonging to Yankeedom," 
he wrote in 1857, " was not national but individual. Of the profits derived from 
the enterprise, it stands thus : "\ ankeedom, $600,000,000 ; myself, individually, 
$000,000,000. Ask the records of the country for the reason why. They will 
answer ; I need not. Were I an Englishman, and had made my discovery on 
English soil, the case would have been different." For this last statement Mar- 
shal had some reason, for the discoverer of gold in Australia, whom Marshal 
claimed to have directed thither, received from the British Government, $25,000, 
and from the Australian Government, $50,000, while Marshal received nothing. 
So much for the discoverer. Now for the discovery. It took place on the 
afternoon of the 24th of January, just after Sutter's mill had been completed, 
and Marshal and his men had made a perilous fight for two weeks to keep the 
clam from being destroyed by the heavy rains which had set in. In this contest 
with the water Marshal had exhibited a courage which made him half deserve 
the accidental fame that came through the finding of the gold. When his men 
were exhibiting to some amazed Indians the workings of their new saw-mill, 
Marshal was inspecting the lower end of the mill-race. He came back with 
the quiet remark, "Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine." He moved off 
to his cabin, went back to the race, and then again returned to his men, directing 
them early in the morning to shut down the head-gate and see what would come 
of it. The next morning the men did as they were told, and presently Marshal 
came back looking wonderfully pleased, carrying in his arms his old white hat, 
in the top of whose crown, sure enough, lay flakes and grains of the precious 
metal. Comparing these pieces with a gold coin one of the men happened to 
have in his pocket, they saw that the coin was a little lighter in color, and 
rightly attributed this to the presence of the alloy. Then all the men hurried 
down the race, and were soon engrossed in picking gold from the seams and 
crevices laid bare by the shutting down of the head-gate. In the midst of their 
excitement doubts would sometimes arise, and some of the metal was thrown 
into vinegar and some boiled in the soap-kettle, to see if it stood these tests. 
Then Marshal went off to General Sutter, and feverish with excitement, told 
him of what had come to light. When he returned to the men he said, " O boys, 
it's the pure stuff! I and the old Cap went into a room and locked ourselves up, 
and we were half a day trying it, and the regulars there wondered what the 
devil was up. They thought perhaps I had found quicksilver, as the woman did 
down toward Monterey. Well, we compared it with the encyclopedia, and it 



43° 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



agreed with it ; we tried aqua fortis, but it would have nothing to do with it. 
Then we weighed it in water; we took scales with silver coins in one side, 
balanced with the dust in the other, and gently let them down into a basin of 
water ; and the gold went down, and the silver came up. That told the story, 
what it was." 

That did tell the story, and though Sutter tried to keep the story a secret 
until all the work in connection with the mills had been finished, the story 
would not keep. A Swiss teamster learned it from a woman who did some of 
the cooking about the mill, received a little of the gold, spent it for liquor at 
the nearest store, and then the fame of the discovery swiftly Hew to the ends 

of the earth. Gen- 
jA^^^^^^B^^^^jL ; eral Sutter had 

been right in his 
endeavor to keep 
the discovery se- 
cret as long as was 
within his power, 
for no sooner did 
the gold hunters' 
invasion set in than 
it became impossi- 
ble for him to get 
men to work the 
mill which he had 
constructed. The 
invaders carried 
things with a high 
hand, and ended by 
setting aside his 
title to his land and 
establishing the claims which they had made upon it. Never was money made 
with anything like such rapidity. Nearly every ravine contained gold in some 
quantity or other. Nobody waited to get machinery to begin work. Knives, 
picks, shovels, sticks, tin pans, wooden bowls, wicker baskets, were the only 
implements needed lor scraping the rock)- beds, sifting the sand, or washing the 
dirt for the gold. A letter in the New York Joui-nal of Commerce, toward 
the end of August, says of the hunt for gold : "At present the people are 
running over the country and picking it out of the earth here and there, just 
as dogs and hogs let loose in the forest would root up ground-nuts. Some get 
even ten ounces a day, and the least active one or two. They make most who 
employ the wild Indians to hunt it for them. There is one man who has sixty 




THE SLUICE. 



THE RUSH FOR THE GOLD FIELD, 431 

Indians under his employ. His profits are a dollar a minute. The wild 
Indians know nothing of its value, and wonder what the pale-faces want to do 
with it, and they will give an ounce of it for the same weight of coin silver or a 
thimbleful of glass heads or a glass oi grog, and white men, themselves, often 
give an ounce of it, which is worth in our mint $18 or more, for a bottle of 
brandy, a bottle of soda powders, or a plug of tobacco." 

This newspaper writer had indeed some of the Munchausen qualities that 
his fellow craftsmen have nowadays, and his opportunities ior exaggeration 
were increased by the remoteness of the scene and the inaccessibility of 
accurate information. California in those days was another part of the world. 
The journey to it overland took weeks, and even months, and was full of perils 
of starvation in case of storm and drought, and perils of slaughter if camps 
of hostile Indians were encountered. When things went well the life was 
pleasant enough, and is still most picturesque to look back upon. The buffalo 
hunts, the meetings with Indians, the kindling of the camp-fires at the centre of 
the great circle of wagons drawn up so as to form a bulwark against attack 
and a corral for the cattle, the story-telling in the light of these camp-fires- — all 
present a picture which men will love to dwell upon so long as the memory of 
the Argonauts survives. But there were many times when the scenes were 
those of heart-sickening desolation. The attacks of the Indians were less 
horrible than attacks of hunger and disease which set in when the emigrant 
train reached a territory where the grass had been consumed, or lost their 
cattle in the terrible snow storms of the Sierras. 

The journey by sea was hardly safer and was far less glorious. Every ship 
for California was loaded down with emigrants packed together as closely as so 
much baggage. Ships with a capacity for five hundred would crowd in fifteen 
hundred. The passage money was from $300 to $600. Often the ships were 
unseaworthy, often packed with coal in such a way that fires broke out. Against 
these dangers the passengers could not provide themselves and could not fight. 
The companies that were able to get their ships back again simply coined money, 
but it was no easy matter in those days to get a ship out of San Francisco 
harbor. The crews would instantly desert for the mines, and the wharves were 
lined with rotting vessels. The vessels which did make the return voyage were 
compelled to pay the California rate ot wages. One ship in which the com- 
mander, engaged at New York, received $250 a month, had to pay on return 
$500 a month to the negro cook. 

San Francisco in these days was the strangest place in the world. In 
February, 1848, it had hardly more than titty houses ; in August it contained 
five hundred, and had a large population that was not housed. A pamphlet 
written in the fall of that year says : " From eight to ten thousand inhabitants 
may be afloat in the streets of San Francisco ; many live in shanties, many in 



4V- 



I III: STORY OB A MERR I 



tents, and man) tin besl way they can." The besl building in the town was the 
Parker House, an ordinary frame structure, a part of which was rented to 

gamblers foi i oa year. Even a higher sum than this was said, by Bayard 

l.i [01 i. iii i been paid. The accommodation was fearful. The worsl thai 
can b< said ol bad hotels may here be imagined. The pasteboard hous< 
1 1. 1 .hi, | n 1 1 up, v. en rented al far more than the cost ol their construction, for 
one figured thai the land was as valuable as if it. had been solid gold, 
A i orrespondenl <>l the New York Evening Post, in November, [849, pictun ; in 
this way the laud owners in San Francisco : "The people ol San Francisco are 

mad. stark mad. A dozen times, in 

my work ol the last lour weeks, 

have I been taken by the arm by 
some ol the millionaires —so they 
• all 1 hemselves, I call them mad 
men — ol San Francisco, looking 
wondrously dirty and out at dhows 
for men of such magnifii enl pre 
ten lion i, I hey have dragged me 

alioul through the mud and tilth 

almost up to my middle, from one 

pine box to another, called man 

sions, hotels, banks, and stores, as it 
may please the imagination, and 
have told me, with a sincerity that 

would ha\ e done credit to a Bed 
I. mule, that the .e splendid struc- 
tures were theirs, and they, the 
fortunate proprietors, were worth 
from three to lour hundred thou- 
sand dollars a year each. 
in, cradli There mu si be nearly two thousand 

hi Hises I ie sides the tents, which are 

still spread in numbers, . . . And what do you suppose to he the value, 
ili' yearly rental, ol tin. 1 aid house city? Not less, it is said, than twelve 
million, ol dollat .. and 1I1 , widi a population of aboul twelve thousand. New 
York, with its five hundred thousand inhabitants, does not give a rental of 
much more than this, il as much." 

I he greater pari ol this city was five times destroyed by fire in the in t 
three yeat i of il exi ;ten< 1 bul the people, with a hopefulness and energy which 
nothing could pill down or burn up, would set to work and rebuild it, almost as 

quicklj as the flames had swepl it away. Everybody worked. The poorest 




THE UNEARTHING OP SILVER, 

man received unheard-oi wages, and the richest man was obliged to do mosl 
things for himself. 

When business <>l every sort was spei illative to .1 degree so 1 lose al in to 

gambling, it is not strange that gambling itsell took | 1 ision ol the people 

and half frenzied them with il ■ excitements, Physical insanity was .1 frequent 
result i>l the moral insanit) "I the community. There were few women in 
California, and most ol these were ol the worst sort. As a consequence, the 
men with no homes to go to in the evenings went into the gambling saloons, 
where they stayed till late al night. According to iome descriptions, everybod) 
gambled, but, as Royce points out in his admirable " I [istory ol < 'alifornia," the 
same men who talk half-boastfull) oi the reckli isness and universality ol the 
gambling, within the next breath speak with great fervor ol the strength and 
genuineness <>l the religious life which soon showed il ;ell in the community 
There is no doubt that the fori es for good as well as for evil were strong from 
the outset, and as the community grew older the forces for good k< pt growing 
stronger. More and morewives from the East had joined theii husbands, and 
the young women who came from the Easl among the emigrants were married 
almost immediately on their arrival. Many a hold keeper who engaged a 
servant girl at $200 a month, was disgusted to find thai she married and left him 
before the month was over. With the introduction ol family life came a return 
to saner moral conditions, and by [853 the old distempered social order bi gan 
to be spoken ol as a thing of the past. 

The greal discovery of silver took place about ten yeai ; aftei tin disco erj 
nl gold. In [857 Allen and Hosea Grosch, two educated and serious-minded 
young men, from Reading, Pennsylvania, came upon the rich vein ol silver 
afterward famous as "The Greal Bonanza." These discoverers were even 

les : fortunate than those who f< d gold in < alifornia. Before they could gel 

together the capital necessarj for the development ol this mine, one ol them 
struck a pick into his foot and died from blood poisoning, while the other was 
caught in a terrible .now storm, and died as the resull ol the freezing of his 
legs, which he would not have amputated. These young men left papers 
describing their discovery in their cabin, which was placed in the chargi ol 
I [enry ( . I . ( omstoi k. I he descriptions were not explicil enough to deter 
mine the exacl location, but Comstock remained in the canon keeping watch 
upon the prospectors. During this time, by his constant watchfulness for a 
greal discovery, he obtained the title ol "Old Pancake " among the miners, 
because, as Wrighl narrates in his " Greal Bonanza," "Even as he stirred his 
pancake batter it is said In- kepi one eye on the head "I some distanl peak and 
was lost in speculation in regard to the wealth "I gold and silver that mighl 
rest somewhere beneath il roi I • < rest." Al last on the roth of fune, 1 9 
two prospectors named McLaughlin and O'Riley came upon a stratum ol 



434 



THE STORY OE AMERICA. 



strange-looking earth, the nature of which they did not understand. Comstock, 
who was immediately on the spots, exclaimed, "You've struck it, boys!" An 
arrangement was at once made to buy off the owners of the claims on which 
the vein was located. Three of the four owners were bought off for fifty dollars 




GOLD-WASHING IN CALIFORNIA, 



apiece ; the fourth sold at some higher figure to another miner named Winters, 
who obtained some inkling of the value of the claim. 

A firm was formed, consisting of Comstock, McLaughlin, O'Riley, Winters, 
and a man named Penrod, who had been one of Comstock' s two partners in 



IMMENSE DEVELOPMENT. 435 

the ownership of a spring necessary to the working of a mine. A third owner 
of this spring, called "Old Virginia." for whom Virginia City was named, 
was persuaded to sell his interest for an old blind horse. The new firm began 
the mining of silver on what came to be called the " Comstock lode." Very 
soon, however, they sold out to men of larger capital, who in turn sold to 
Mackay and Fair, famous the world over among America's millionaires. The 
subsequent fortunes of the firm which Comstock formed are interesting to 
follow, as they again illustrate the fate which came upon most of the men who 
brought to light the hidden mineral treasures of the Western territory. Com- 
stock sold his interest for $11,000, became a merchant in Carson City, married 
the deserting wife of a Mormon, was soon in his turn deserted by her, failed in 
his business adventure, and ended his life by suicide. McLaughlin sold his 
interest at $3500, soon spent what he received, and afterward became a cook 
in a mine in California. Penrod and Winters were also soon poor men, while 
CV Riley, the last to sell, engaged in stock gambling with the $40,000 he received, 
was soon forced to resort to pick and pan for a living, and ended his life in a 
private asylum. The great fortunes, as has been said, were made by the later 
comers. Those who bought the mine from the original firm lost most that they 
made in litigation. Senator Stewart used to receive annually as much as 
$200,000 in fees as the principal attorney of some of the Comstock companies. 
He estimated the cost of litigation up to January, 1866, at $10,000,000. When 
the Comstock mines finally came into the hands of Fair, Mackay, and O'Brien, 
scientific methods were introduced, and the stock of the " Consolidated Virginia " 
rapidly rose from $85 a share in January, 1874, to $700 a share in [anuary, 1875. 
The shares in another mine in the same lode rose to a like figure, and the two 
together had a market value of $160,000,000. During five years these mines 
produced over $100,000,000 worth of silver. After 1878 their product fell 
gradually, and the price of the stock went down. Bancroft, in his " History of 
Nevada," says that down to January 1, 1881, $306,000,000 worth of silver 
bullion was extracted from the Comstock lode. Yet he doubts whether that 
mountain of silver has proven a permanent advantage to Nevada. The wealth 
which came from her mines, he says, was to a large degree squandered by 
gamblers in New York and Paris, and used for purposes of political bribery and 
social corruption in Virginia City and San Francisco. The wealth that exists in 
Nevada to-day has come from improvements made by the people who came and 
developed the farms, made the roads, established the systems of irrigation, and 
built the stores, the factories, and the homes. 

With the introduction of scientific mining requiring mills and machinery 
costing vast sums of money, the wage system took the place of the free and 
independent mining of the earlier days. It is true that the mine laborers still 
remained their own masters, by organizing as workmen were never organized 



436 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

before, and compelling mine owners, for years, to pay four dollars a day as die 
minimum day's wages. But the mining life which came in with the wage system 
is the orderly life of to-day, not essentially different from that of Eastern com- 
munities. The life in the mining camps, to which all romances go back, was the 
life that prevailed when every laborer was his own capitalist, and every capitalist 
his own laborer. Never were so many men from so many places suddenly 




AT WORK IN THE SILVER MINES OF NEVADA. 



thrown together, as in California in '48 and '49. What came afterward in 
Nevada, and later still in Colorado, was like it in kind but not in degree. The 
Californians of the early days were without law, and thousands of miles away 
from established tribunals. Every man was a law unto himself, e.xcept when 
the community, as a whole, became aroused, and constituted itself a tribunal. 
The Territory was indeed nominally organized, but to wait for the regular 
process of law was to grant immunity to crime. The character of " miners' 



ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE. 437 

justice" may be illustrated by some of the scenes at Sonora, where gold 
was first discovered. Here there had been law and order previous to 
the miners' invasion, but with the invasion demoralization set in. In 
the fall of '48 the newcomers, following the Mexican fashion, elected two 
Alcaldes, but when one of the storekeepers at the settlement killed a man in a 
fight, both the officers promptly resigned rather than run the risk of arresting 
the homicide. Another storekeeper, however, called the people together to take 
action. This storekeeper was promptly elected Alcalde, and it was decided that 
one Alcalde was enough. A Prosecuting Attorney was likewise required, but no 
one was ready to take the office, and each person nominated promptly declined 
and nominated some one else. Finally the energetic storekeeper was obliged to 
accept this office also. The meeting succeeded in finding a second man to take 
the office of Sheriff. The offender was arrested, a jury impaneled, and the trial 
begun. The prisoner, on being brought in court, was requested to lay his arms 
on the table, and did so. On this table stood a plentiful supply of brandy and 
water, to which everybody in the court-room helped himself at pleasure. The 
trial, however, proceeded with much attempt at legal form, and presently the 
Judge arose and began a plea for the prosecution. " Hold on, Brannan," said 
the prisoner, "you are the Judge." "I know it," replied that official, "and I am 
Prosecuting Attorney, too." He went on with his speech, and ended it by an 
appeal to himself as Judge in connection with the jury. When he had finished, 
the prisoner, after helping himself to a glass of brandy, made an able speech 
in his own defense. Night came on and the jury scattered without bringing in a 
verdict. The prisoner was admitted to bail, because there was no prison to 
put him in. The next day the jury met, but disagreed about the verdict. A 
new trial was held and the prisoner acquitted. 

In most of the mining camps the administration of justice fell into the hands 
of the Vigilance Committees. A great many wild stories have been written about 
the trials they held, and story writers have been fond of depicting scenes where 
a higher form of justice was carried out than the conventional trials in older 
communities permit. There were, indeed, occasions when sudden and powerful 
appeals to the emotions of the Committee produced sudden and good effects, 
but as a rule the hearts of the Committee were no more open than their reasons. 
That they had assembled at all usually meant that there had been an accumula- 
tion of wrongs unpunished, and the gathered indignation of the community vented 
itself upon the single individual who happened to be brought to trial. Miners' 
justice was indeed far better than lynch law. As Shinn has pointed out in his 
book on " Mining Camps ": " Lynch law is carried out at night by a transient mob, 
which keeps no records, conceals the names of its ministers, and is in its essence 
disorderly. Miners' justice, on the other hand, was executed in broad daylight, 
by men well known, who gave the prisoner a hearing, and kept a careful record 



43§ 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of their doings." Yet, in spite of this, the assembling of the Committee was so 
irregular, its constituency so doubtful, its verdicts either so ferocious or so 
inadequate, or both — as when the favorite penalty of flogging and banishment 
was imposed — that the establishment of regular tribunals was in every respect 
an important gain to the mining communities. This change took place about 
the time that scientific mining was introduced, with regular pay for regular work. 
Before that time California, both as regards the rewards of labor and the punish- 
ment of crime, had seemed a world ruled by chance. 




WASHINGTON S CRAVE. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

The Problem of Our National Currency. 

BY HON. JOHN SHERMAN, 

Ex-Secretary of the Treasury. 



Its History and Evolution. 

By HON. J. K. UPTON, 
First Assistant Secretary of Treasury under Sherman, Windom, and Folger. 

Money, as used to effect the exchange of commodities, is the greatest 
labor-saving machine ever invented by man. Without money wealth might 
exist, but it would bring to the possessor but few comforts. This commercial 

contrivance is, however, of no recent 
origin, for we read that in the days of the 
Patriarchs Abraham used money to pay 
for the cave of Machpelah, in which to 
bury his dead. The story of that trans- 
action is a significant one, showing at 
what an early date mankind adopted the 
use of money. Abraham was at the head 
of a nomadic tribe encamped among the 
simple people of Hebron, who looked 
upon him as a mighty prince. Upon tin- 
death of his wife he naturally desired to 
give her a sepulture worthy of his rank 
and position. Word was therefore sent 
out that he wished to purchase a lot of 
ground for such a purpose, preferring the 
cave of Machpelah, for which he would 
pay a proper amount of money. Ephron 
the owner of the cave, declared that it was worth four hundred shekels of silver' 
and Abraham therefore weighed them out to him, as "current money amono- 
the merchants." and in return received his title to the cave, the boundaries and 
transfer duly witnessed. 

439 




HON. JOHN SHERMAN. 



440 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

In this transaction are found in effect all the form and methods employed 
for a like transaction to-day, except that the weighing of the money at the time 
of the transfer is obviated by the metal having been previously converted into 
disks of known and uniform weight. 

But for the general use of* money to effect such changes of property 
Ephron could hardly have found terms in which to express the value of his 
cave, and Abraham could hardly have paid for it, unless Ephron would have 
accepted therefor a portion of his flocks, which, though valuable to Abraham, 
might not have been needed by Ephron, and he might have found trouble in 
exchanging them ior what he did need, as only for "current money" would the 
merchants surely part with their goods. 

That silver, out of all the products of the earth and sea, had already been 
selected for use as money, is especially creditable to the commercial acuteness 
of these ancient people. A search of three thousand years since made has 
found no better commodity for that purpose. In recent years It has been 
supplemented by the use of gold, a metal possessing for money most of the 
qualities of silver, and its higher value in relation to its weight renders it more 
serviceable, perhaps, in transactions involving large amounts. Upon one or 
the other of these metals the commercial exchanges of the world have been 
effected for centuries, and in the terms of their weight all values of property 
have come to be expressed. When we say an article is worth so many dollars, 
pounds, or francs, we only mean that it can be exchanged for so many pieces 
of gold or silver, the weight of the pieces being known, fixed, and uniform. 

The experiment of using other commodities for money has, however, often 
been tried. At different times and in various places, hand-made nails, the 
shells of clams, tail feathers of birds, skins of animals, cattle, corn and tobacco, 
and nearly all the products of the field and the chase have been used as money, 
but their tendency to decay or their inability to withstand the attrition of 
circulation have soon rendered them worthless, though in some cases they 
served well the exigencies which brought them into such use. 

Promises to pay certain specified amounts of money on demand have also 
been issued in recent years for money, both by the State and by private 
corporations, and though only of paper, have served a valuable auxiliary as 
long as the promises were promptly redeemed in money. The ancients had 
none of this so-called paper money, perhaps because they had no paper, but 
they closely approximated the use of representative money when they cut out 
from the skin of an animal an irregularly outlined piece and paid it out at the 
value of the skin itself, with the understanding that the holder could at any 
time obtain the skin therefor, provided that upon presentation for that purpose 
the piece was found to fit the hole from which it was taken. 

The use of checks in business, the offsettine of credits aeainst each other 



THE FUNCTIONS OF MONEY. 441 

through the agency of banks and clearing-houses in the centres of trade, have, 
to a certain extent, relieved money from a portion of its duties ; but financial 
transactions of every kind are based upon a money standard, and resulting 
balances paid only by money itself. 

The natural functions of money, of whatever character it consists, are, 
therefore, to aid in the transfer of property from one party to another, and to 
furnish a common standard in which all values may be expressed. 

The State, however, not content with using money for the simple purposes 
mentioned, has brought it into politics and clothed it with a new function by 
which it can satisfy a contract with less than the amount called lor, or with a 
new kind of money not contemplated in the contract. This extraordinary 
endowment is known as the legal tender quality, and it is only effective when 
backed by the power of the State. Under this illogical and unnatural acquisi- 
tion forced upon it by law, money springs into prominence as a political factor, 
and begins to have a history, or rather to create one. 

From this new legal-tender function three projects have sprung by which 
money, heretofore an impartial factor in the transfer of property, becomes 
an aggressive agent by which the most sacred rights of a man to his own 
accumulations have been destroyed. 

These projects may be classified as follows : — 

1st. To retain the name of the coin, but to take from it a portion of its 
value, the reduced piece to be equally available in payment of a debt, known 
as debasing the coinage. 

2d. To issue paper promises-to-pay, of certain amounts, the issue to be 
a full satisfaction for all debts to the amount of its face, known as inflation. 

3d. To substitute, at a rate fixed by law, one metal for another, and to 
give the creditor the option of paying his debts in either, known as bi-metalism. 

A monetary history of any country is mainly but a recount of the 
operations of money as a legal tender, for money left to natural laws has no 
history, no more than has the ceaseless flow of a river or the rise and fall of 
the tide. 

In the days of Abraham, with no legal-tender quality, money did its work 
silently and faithfully, unrestricted by legislation, and we know of its existence 
only incidentally. To the laws of this country that have intervened to check 
and misdirect its operations is due the history which this article will relate. 

Debasing the Coinage. — The early settlers of this country, coming from 
England, were accustomed to reckon values in pounds, shillings, and pence, and 
to use the shillings of that country as current money. These pieces have a 
history worthy to be related : William I, the Norman King placed in the Tower 
a bar of silver \\ fine, containing 3 + of an ounce troy more than the troy 
pound of 5760 grains, and declared it to be the standard, both of weights and 



442 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

values, for his newly acquired realm. As a standard of value, this Tower 
pound was divided into 240 parts, each part to be known as a penny, and for 
many years only pennies were coined ; but as trade increased, out of the pound 
were coined twenty pieces known as shillings, each necessarily containing twelve 
pence. As a standard of weight, the same pound was also divided into 240 
parts, each part to be known as a pennyweight, being of the same weight as a 
penny ; but for some reason the relation of weight and value was then aban- 
doned, and the pound was divided into twelve parts, to be known as ounces, 
each part, of course, containing twenty pennyweights. 

This ingenious and admirable combination of the two standards was not 
permitted to continue long, for Edward III, finding his crown debts pressing, 
directed that twenty-two shillings be coined from a pound instead of twenty, and 
by making the new pieces a legal tender for the same purposes as those pre- 
viously issued he cheated his creditors out of two shillings on every pound of 
debt, as the new pieces had no value in the market except what their weight for 
bullion gave them. 

The successors of this monarch repeatedly worked this silent and sleek 
scheme for replenishing their depleted coffers at the expense of their debtors, 
until Queen Elizabeth by royal proclamation declared that out of the troy pound, 
which Henry VIII had substituted for the Tower pound, there should be coined 
sixty-two of these pieces. By this time the shilling contained only about one- 
third of its original amount of silver, and even the dunderheaded Englishmen 
began to see there was cheating somewhere around the board, and that royalty 
alone was winning the stakes. So a great clamor was raised, and since then no 
debasement of the full legal-tender coins has taken place in Merrie England. 

The colonists, who brought these pieces with them to this country, were 
doubtless familiar with this process of debasing coins and the gain that would 
come therefrom to the State, for as early as 1652 the Massachusetts Colony set 
up a mint and commenced the coinage of shilling pieces avowedly containing 
but ten pence worth of silver. The mint master, however, took fifteen pence 
out of every twenty shillings coined, and then the English Mint declared the 
silver in the coins was not of an even weight or fineness, and so the pieces circu- 
lated at twenty-five per cent, discount, though, being a legal tender at their face 
value, they were worth par in payment of debt. These shillings, however, 
became the standard by which values were reckoned from that time on, though 
but few were coined, and those were hoarded or shipped abroad, notwithstanding 
such shipment was forbidden by severe penalties, for there existed in the colonies 
a cheaper way of paying debts than that afforded even by debased coins. Clam 
shells, cattle, corn, and beaver had been made legal tender, and the principle 
laid down by Sir Thomas Gresham, of Queen Elizabeth's time, that no two 
currencies of unequal value would circulate together — the poorer driving out 



DEBASED COINAGE. 



443 



the better — was the secret of the deportation of the coin. To protect the 
Treasury against the operations of this law, in 1658 it was ordered that taxes 
should not be paid in "lank cattle." Of clam shells, also, it was found that only 
the broken and lustreless ones remained in circulation — the poorer currency 
driving out the better, whether of cattle or of clam shells. At this opportune 
moment the Spanish pillar silver dollar, brought to this country mainly by 
buccaneers, began to circulate throughout the colonies, with its " pieces oi eight," 
or reals. This dollar was a stranger in a strange land, and had nothing to 
recommend it to favor except that it bore the device of a nation whose 
commercial integrity had never been questioned. But the colonists reckoned 



"-'j-v'-' 'm'A' • '" " 




f^SMl&- , '- 



l'HE UNITED STATES MINT, NEW ORLI I 



in shillings and pence, and the relation in value between the strange piece and 
a shilling must necessarily be fixed in some way. The English Mint declared 
the piece contained four shillings and six pence of sterling silver, and this became 
the established rate in South Carolina, but the Massachusetts Colony declared 
it contained six shillings, and of the shillings of that colony this was about right. 
Virginia adopted the same rating. New York declared that the piece contained 
eight shillings, though that colony never had a shilling piece of any kind, and 
nowhere in the world was there one of that value. Pennsylvania, for no reason 
stated, said it contained seven shillings and six pence, while Maryland adopted the 
rating of New York. Thus in New England and Virginia the real became a 
"nine pence," in New York and Maryland a shilling, and in Pennsylvania it 



444 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

was called eleven pence, or "levy;" and by these names it was known for nearly 
two centuries. The dollar having taken the place of the pound in reckonings, 
to a certain extent, it was subdivided into shillings and pence for purposes of 
accounts, those being the lower denominations in use, and accordingly in Virginia 
and New England accounts were kept frequently in dollars and "2ds ; in New 
York and Maryland in dollars and o6ths ; in Pennsylvania in dollars and ooths, 
as seen in the Treasury books of the Confederation, while in South Carolina 
they were kept in dollars and 54-ths, for in every case a shilling still contained 
twelve pence, and these fractional divisions of the dollar represented the number 
of pence the several colonies alleged this piece contained. 

The accounts of Washington as he traveled from Mount Vernon to Boston, 
filed in the Treasury, show the changes rendered necessary in the reckonings as 
he passed through the several States, sometimes the local pound, sometimes the 
dollar, being the unit, but in the end the distinguished traveler reduced the cur- 
rencies to one standard and determined how much was due him in Spanish 
dollars and reals, a feat in computation for which the Father of his Country has 
never received due credit. 

Of course, these diverse valuations of the shilling gave to the pounds cor- 
responding variations in values, and as trade was mainly with the mother coun- 
trv, exchanges were conducted with endless confusions in the reckonings. Had 
the colonists kept the pound sterling for their unit, used the English shillings 
and pence for their coins, as they were accustomed, all these complications 
would have been avoided. But contracts were out calling for shillings, and the 
finding of more shillings in a dollar by law than existed in fact defrauded the cred- 
itor to that extent of his just dues, the result if not the purpose of the legal- 
tender quality given these coins, whose existence even was to a certain extent 
fictitious. The use of silver as a circulating medium was, however, soon aban- 
doned for paper issues. 

Paper Money. — The Massachusetts Colony was the first to issue paper 
money. In 1690, to satisfy the claims of her soldiers who had been on an expe- 
dition to Canada and came back without booty, 7000 pounds were issued, but 
being made receivable in payment of taxes, did not suffer great depreciation, 
though according to Sumner the soldiers disposed of it at 33 per cent, discount. 
Other limited issues followed in anticipation of .taxes, but in 1709, to pay for 
another expedition against Canada, 50,000 pounds were issued. Other colonies 
joined in the expedition and all issued paper to pay expenses. The issues were 
made a legal tender and the acceptance of the notes enforced from time to time 
by stringent enactments. Notwithstanding this, they continued to depreciate. 
Industries at first stimulated lagged, and a great demand arising for additional 
issues to make business brisk, the colonial governments or their chartered banks 
issued bills upon almost any pretext, — as in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, 



A DUAL STANDARD. 445 

upon real estate mortgages, family silver, and other securities. In the latter 
State interest was made payable in flax and hemp, to encourage those industries, 
but very few of its loans were ever paid, and the titles to lands fell into inextric- 
able confusion. New loans were issued by the colonies with which to pay off 
the old ones, until the issues of the Massachusetts Colony were depreciated to 
11 for 1, at which rate the notes were redeemed. The notes of other colonies 
were also retired upon various scales until 1 75 1 , when Parliament prohibited, in 
most of the colonies, the further issue of legal-tender notes. The depreciated 
bills out of the way, silver returned, and even some gold appeared in circulation, 
also brought in by buccaneers. 

Bi-Metalism. — The colonists tried a great many commodities for a standard 
of value, but only twice did they undertake to have two standards in circulation 
at once, their values to be kept equal by the force of law. 

Exploring parties of the Massachusetts Colony found on the shores of 
Long Island a partially civilized community of Indians. Some of them living 
along the shores were engaged in polishing the shell of the clam and of the 
periwinkle, which they traded off for ornaments at a pretty well established rate. 
The shells were called Peag, and they served every purpose of money among 
the simple natives. One black shell was about equal to two white ones, but in 
the absence of any law fixing a parity of value both shells circulated, each for 
what it was worth, the white at about six, the black about three for a penny. 
The colonists, however, made Peag a legal tender for twelve pence, and im- 
mediately their deterioration commenced — lusterless and half polished shells 
being as good as any in payment of debt. Again the law came to its rescue, 
and, in 1648, provided that only such Peag as was unbroken and of good color 
should pass as money. A little later it provided that Peag should lie a legal 
tender for forty shillings, the white at eight, the black at six for a penny. Peag 
was now not only a legal tender in payment of debt in a modest way, but a 
fixed relation was established between the value of the white ami the Mack 
shells. The law did all it could to extend the circulation of these shells, but 
Peag was perverse, ami, just as great results were expected from it, it wholly 
disappeared from circulation, having become so utterly worthless nobody would 
accept it, doubtless somewhat to the surprise of the " Bi-Shellists, " whose faith 
in the efficacy of a double standard seemed unbounded. 

The next colonial experiment of the kind was in 1762. The gold which 
followed in the channels of the depreciated paper, as above mentioned, circu- 
lated at its own value and was very useful, but it soon attracted the attention 
of the General Court of Massachusetts, and with the declared purpose to 
facilitate trade, this court, in that year, made gold a legal tender at two and a 
half pence silver per grain. At this rating gold was the cheaper metal for 
paying debts, and, in conformity with the Gresham law, silver promptly dis- 



446 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

appeared from circulation, leaving gold to circulate alone. The colonists were 
surprised at the result and were at a loss to know what caused it, but silver 
would not return to associate with gold on the terms fixed by law, and the 
colonists had to get along as best they could for a few years, when the necessi- 
ties of war brought about other forms of currency. 

In September, 1774, the first Congress of the colonies assembled in 
Philadelphia with a view to obtain a redress of grievances, not a separation 
from the mother country. It was composed of delegates from every colony, 
and had no clearly defined powers. The conflict at Lexington, in April, 1775, 
while this Congress was holding its second session, dispelled all hopes of a 
pacific settlement of the difficulties, and preparations ior war were promptly 
begun. To meet expenses money was necessary, but this body had no power 
to levy a tax. The members, however, were accustomed to the issue of bills as 
a substitute for money, and to such issue they naturally turned. On the 10th 
of May, 1775, an act was passed authorizing the issue of $3,000,000 on the 
faith of the "Continent," by which the bills became known as Continental 
money. They were in form as follows : — 

C0NTINENTA1 , CU RRENCY. 

No Dollars. 

This bill entitles the bearer to receive Spanish 

milled dollars, or the value thereof in gold or silver, according to the 
resolutions of the Congress held at Philadelphia, on the 10th day of 
May, a. d. 1775. 

Nothing appears on the face of the bill as to its redemption, but the law 
imposed upon the several colonies the duty to redeem the issue within three 
years, at a stated amount for each, based upon its population. This was 
probably as far as this Congress had power to go, but the several colonies, 
instead of levying a tax to meet the redemption of the notes, set up their own 
printing presses and entered into competition with each other and Congress in 
the issue of additional notes of their own. Within a year Congress, having 
issued $9,000,000 of its notes, and their value depreciating, took prompt and 
harsh measures to force their circulation and maintain their value, imposing 
severe penalties upon any one refusing to accept them at par in exchange for 
commodities. In 1777 the colonies, at the urgent request of Congress, stopped 
their issues, but not until they had put into circulation about $210,000,000. 
The exact amount was never known, the issue having been so hurried that no 
count of it was made. How far they ever went in contracting or redeeming 
their issues it is impossible to discover. Of the Continental issues the limit of 
^,200,000,000 was reached in 1779, of which $65,500,000 were issued the year 



CONTINENTAL CURRENCY. 



447 



previous. This was the good-sized straw which broke the back of the patient 
camel. The next year the notes were worth only two cents on the dollar, 

practically disappearing from 
Tfl] circulation. In Philadelphia 
they were then used for wall 
Daper, and a dog covered with 
tar, stuck lull of the bills, was 
chased through the streets amid 
the jeers of the crowd. The 
utter lack of value in these 
notes gave rise to the expression, 
"Not worth a Continental." 




THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE 



For the ruinous policy pursued, the 
local colonial governments alone were re- 
sponsible. To meet the expenses of the war they would neither levy a 
tax themselves nor authorize their Congress to do so. That in the end the 
hills were repudiated does not signify that the war to that extent cost the 



448 THE STORY OF AM URIC A. 

colonics nothing. The amount of the depreciation was only a form of a tax 
paid by every one in proportion to the amount of money he held and the 
time he held it, thus imposing upon the officers and soldiers who fought the 
battles, and upon their families, the patriotic and the helpless, the main cost of 
the war, leaving to the Tories, and those who stayed at home, comparative 
exemption from its burdens. But the forced issue of such legal-tender bills 
worked more than pecuniary hardship. Says a prominent writer of the period : 
"We have suffered more from this cause (paper money) than from any other 
cause or calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest 
interests of our country more, and done more injustice than even the arms and 
artifices of our enemy." 

This paper being out of the way, specie flowed in to take its place, and 
there was soon no stringency in the circulation. But the itching for paper 
money was not cured, and in 1781 the Bank of North America was chartered in 
Philadelphia, with authority to issue notes with which to purchase rations for the 
army. The notes were redeemable at sight in the Spanish dollars, and though 
their redemption was maintained, the people were cautious and slow in taking 
them. In Rhode Island 100,000 pounds legal tenders were issued on land 
mortgages. The notes immediately depreciated, endless litigation ensued, and 
in October, 1789, the depreciation was lived by law at eighteen for one, but at 
that rate the debtors were allowed to pay in produce. 

This ended paper money schemes under the Confederation. Initiatory 
steps were meanwhile taken toward the establishment of a Mint, that the country 
might have a distinctive coinage of its own. In 1785 Congress adopted the 
Spanish dollar as the unit of value, a function it was then performing in many 
cases by common consent, and the following year declared that it contained of 
pure silver 375.64 grains. The decimal system was also required in accounts. 
At the same time the coinage of a ten dollar gold piece, containing 246.268 
grains, was authorized — making in law one of weight in gold equal in value to 
15.253 of silver, while in the market the ratio was one to 14.89. Why silver 
should thus have: been undervalued when its use was so generally popular and 
universal does not appear, but the adoption of the Constitution prevented 
further steps from being taken under this law. 

Bi Metalism. — The" new Constitution was adopted March 4, 1789. One of 
its provisions gave Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. 
Alexander Hamilton was called to the Treasury, and to him Congress referred 
the subject for investigation and report. In response he urged that both silver 
and gold be coined lor depositors in unlimited amounts, one pound in weight in 
gold to be equal to fifteen pounds in silver for coins. I [e urged a dollar tor the 
unit to contain either 371 ' + grains of pure silver or 24^ grains of pure gold, 
the introduction of the decimal system in accounts, and the coinage of hakes, 



BI-METALISM. 449 

quarters, and dimes in silver of proportionate weight. Hamilton believed, or at 
least hoped, that with the relation established both metals would circulate 
together, though he admitted that if the relation should not prove to be the 
market one, only the cheaper metal would remain in circulation. 

Jefferson believed tin- ratio of one to fifteen to be the proper one, and urged 
its adoption. The recommendations of Hamilton were soon incorporated into a 
law, a Mint was established, and coins struck as contemplated. In the market one 
of gold proved worth nearer 1 5 ' + of silver, and, following Gresham's law, only 
silver coins remained in circulation. ( .old coins were hoarded or shipped abroad. 

But the new silver dollars soon met with competition, The clipped and 
worn Spanish pieces, having been made a legal tender, entered into circulation 
and in turn drove out the new silver coins, so that all the output oi the Mint was 
mainly for exportation. To prevent the shipment of silver the Mint gave 
preference to coining fractional pieces, thus exhausting its capacity upon as little 
silver in value as possible. 

In 1S05 only 321 dollar pieces were coined, and on May 1, 1806, President 
Jefferson, through James Madison, Secretary of State, sent an order to Robert 
Patterson, Director of tin- Mint, "That all tin; silver to be.coined at the Mint 
shall be of small denomination, so that the; value of the largest pieces shall nol 
exceed one-half dollar." The coinage thus entirely suspended was not resumed 
for thirty years. 

As a result the country had only bank issues ami the light-weight foreign 
coins, and could not understand why it had to put up with such a poor currency. 
The Mints were open for the coinage oi gold and for the fractional silver, and a 
large number of pieces were being struck, but none of them found their way 
into circulation. 

The Democratic party, headed by Mr. Benton, then a Senator from 
Missouri, determined to increase the ratio between tin two metals with the hope 
of retaining gold, So an act was passed in 1834 reducing the weight of tin- 
gold coins about seven percent. The gold dollar now contained 23.22 grain ;, 
making the ratio between the two metals about one to sixteen. It now 
turned out that silver was the undervalued metal, and even had there been no 
cheaper foreign coins in existence, it would have lied the country, leaving the 
gold alone for circulation. Put the light-weight foreign coins and depreciated 
bank-bills circulated freely, and little was seen of either silver or gold coins of 
this country. 

'I he Peal pieces became so worn that in every transaction a dispute arose 
as to whether the pillars could be seen, until somebody scratched an X on the 
piece, when it passed as a dime, and was over-valued at that. To correct 
this evil, in 1853 Congress directed a reduction in the weight of the fractional 
silver pieces, forbade- the Mint to coin them for depositors, and directed their 
29 



45° THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

coinage to be made only on Government account, and to be issued at their face 
value only in exchange for gold coins or silver dollars. In 1S57 the Spanish 
and Mexican dollars and the Real pieces were authorized to be redeemed at 
the Mint at a little above their bullion value, — they no longer to be legal tender 
These latter pieces immediately disappeared, and the bright, new dimes, 
quarters, and halves, fresh from the Mint, took their places. 

The bank issues being now well under control, gold coin also began to 
circulate. Gold pieces for larger transactions, silver pieces for smaller ones, 
made a very satisfactory currency. The Government received and paid out 
no other money on public account until 1862, when coin was again largely 
forced out of circulation by the legal-tender greenbacks. The opening up 
ot new silver mines in the West, however, brought considerable silver to 
the Mints for coinage into dollars, but not for circulation, — the bullion in a 
dollar being worth about $1.05, — but for exportation at its bullion value. 

About this time a revision of the mint laws was made by officials of the 
Treasury Department, and a bill prepared at the Treasury, after several years 
of delay, passed Congress and received the approval of the President, 
February 12, 1873. To aid the producers of silver bullion in finding a market 
for their product, authority was given to the mint for the manufacture "of silver 
disks or bars, to bear the stamp of the government as a guaranty of their 
weight and fineness, the depositor to pay the expense of their manufacture ; 
and the coinage of the former silver dollars was no longer authorized. Under 
this authority coins were manufactured, known as trade dollars, each one 
seven and one-half grains greater in weight than the other silver dollars. The 
scheme proved a success, and a large number were manufactured and sent 
abroad. In China they were used as a circulating medium, creating a special 
market in which there was little or no competition. 

< iermany, however, having determined to adopt the gold standard, redeemed 
its enormous issues of silver pieces, melted them down, and thus brought into 
the market, at once, over 7,000,000 pounds of silver. Large discoveries of the 
metal were also made in Nevada, and silver became greatly depreciated in the 
markets of the world. Had not the coinage of the silver dollars been prohibited 
by the Act of 1S73, tne silver dollar would again, under the Gresham law, have 
taken its place as the unit in our currency, driving gold from circulation, and, 
regardless of its depreciation, would have been a legal tender for even pre- 
existing contracts. 

An outcry therefore arose, that in the prohibition of the silver dollar the 
debtor class had been greatly wronged, although very few of that class, or of 
any other, had ever seen or.expected to see a silver dollar in circulation. 

Upon the assembling of Congress in 1877, a determined effort was made 
to restore the silver dollar to free circulation, and a bill to that effect, known as 



PAPER MONEY. 451 

the Bland bill, passed the House, but was so changed in the Senate that the 
Treasury was authorized to purchase not less than $2,000,000 nor more than 
^4,000,000 worth of silver bullion monthly, at the best rate obtainable, and to 
coin it into dollars for which certificates might be issued, the dollars to remain 
in the Treasury untouched to meet their redemption upon presentation ; and 
thus amended the bill became a law, February 28, 1S7S. The provisions of this 
act, however, did not prove satisfactory, and in 1890 another concession was 
made to the advocates of the unlimited coinage of the silver dollar by authoriz- 
ing the Government to purchase, at the best rates obtainable, 4,500,000 ounces 
of silver every month and to issue silver certificates thereon for the amount of 
the purchase, the metal to be coined into silver dollars only as needed for the 
redemption of the certificates issued. 

Under these two acts there have been issued about $400,000,000 of 
silver dollars, of which about $60,000,000 are in circulation, the remainder are 
in the Treasury, held to meet the certificates which have been issued thereon, 
and purchases of bullion are being made every month as required. The 
price of silver bullion has, however, constantly depreciated until the metal 
in a silver dollar can be purchased in the market for 70 cents in gold, and 
the prospect of a parity of value between the two metals, at the present ratio 
of 1 to 16, seems as far off as ever. 

The enforced purchase of such an enormous amount of silver every 
month, and the issue of certificates thereon for circulation, must cease some 
day. The amount of money needed for circulation must be left to the 
necessity of business, not to an act of Congress. Until that time monetary 
questions, in one form or another, will continue to vex the halls of legislation 
and. to needlessly disturb the prosperity of the country. 

Papa- Money. — The Constitution of 1 789 provided that no State should 
emit bills of credit, make anything legal tender but gold and silver, or 
change the terms of a pre-existing contract. Consequently, the power to 
issue paper money, if existing anywhere in the country, was lodged in the 
general government. 

As a result, in 1790, Hamilton recommended to Congress the establish- 
ment of a National Bank, with authority to issue $10,000,000 of bills legally 
receivable in payment of public dues, and an act for that purpose was 
promptly approved, but not without grave doubts of the power of the govern- 
ment to grant such a charter. The bank, gaining public confidence, its notes 
circulated at par and were accepted as readily in private transactions as 
though made a legal tender for that purpose. 

The States, stripped of their power to emit bills directly, also resorted 
to issues of banks organized under their charters. These bills were always 
redeemable at sight by the bank issuing them. Not being a legal tender, 



452 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the notes had only a commercial value, but a bank in good standing was 
enabled to keep more or less of them in circulation in its immediate vicinity, 
and usually maintaining but small reserve, reaped much profit from this use 
of its credit. Away from their home, however, the bills were subjected to 
varying rates of discount, sometimes as high as fifty per cent., and specula- 
tion in them kept business feverish and unsettled. 

The temptation to profit by such issues led to endless schemes to 
impose upon the public worthless bills, and these issues became known, in 
time, as wild-cat currency. In 1809 a crash came, and none too soon, for 
even in New England, where such issues were best guarded, one bank had 
out more than $500,000 in bills with only £84 in specie to meet their 
redemption, and others were about as weak. Great loss ensued from the 
panic, and more rigorous restrictive legislation for future issues was enacted, 
at least in that section. 

The issues of the National Bank were kept at par, but its charter expiring 
in 181 1, the bank was unable to obtain a renewal; the influence of the bank 
in restricting the depreciated issues of the state banks had been too salutary to 
suit the demands of those who wanted money plenty, regardless of its value. 
The National Bank out of the way, the mania for bank issues began to develop 
in the Middle and Western States. In 18 14 all the banks outside of New 
England suspended paying specie for bills. No excuse for the suspension is 
apparent, except the war then going on with England. With the return of 
peace, however, came additional issues of bank paper, and for a while apparent 
prosperity prevailed. 

The unequal value of the notes in different sections of the country some- 
what embarrassed exchanges, but it was thought that in time, when the people were 
accustomed to such conditions, the difficulties would vanish. In 1814 Pennsyl- 
vania chartered 41 banks, and in the year following. Kentucky 40 more, their 
capital aggregating $27,000,000 with little or no restriction as to the issue of 
notes. This period was considered by many as the golden age of the West, 
but most of the banks failed within a year or two, and their enormous issues 
became worthless. In 1S18 twenty thousand persons in Philadelphia were 
begging employment. Business was at a stand-still and property was unsalable 
at any price. The National Bank, which had obtained a renewal of its charter 
in 181 6, for twenty years, suspended specie payments with other banks. 

The depreciated issues drove all the coin from the West into New England, 
which, having a comparatively stable standard and circulation, soon absorbed 
pretty much all the trade of the country, for even clipped and light-weight 
foreign coins, were infinitely preferable to such bank issues. But the demand 
for bank issues was renewed throughout the country, and again there could be 
but one result. In 1S37 another crash came. Even the New York and 



J / VLB- CA T CURRENCl '. 



453 



Massachusetts country banks, comparatively conservativ 

the rate of twenty-five to 

After this explosion came 

of President [ackson, by 

ury thereafter received 

of public dues. Fortu- 

have been for the welfare 

public Treasury and every 

from the outset treated 

issues in the same way, 

upon specie alone for 

circulation, of which 

there was at all 

times enough for 



e, were issuing notes at 
one of specie reserve. 
the famous specie order 
which the public Treas- 
only specie in payment 
nate indeed would it 
of the country if the 
individual had 
all the bank 
I p . A and depended 




the purpose, or the deficiency 
could have been promptly sup- 
a raid ox a bank. P lied b V the Mi nt, which was 

coining silver for exportation. 
Bank notes, generally at par, continued to furnish the circulation of the 
country, however, till the outbreak of the Rebellion, with only a brief disturbance 



454 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

in 1857, but it must be remembered they were at par only in the vicinity of 
their issue. 

In 1 86 1 Congress met in special session to find the Capitol a military camp. 
An army had been called to the field to suppress the uprising of the South, 
threatening the very existence of the Government. To meet pressing needs the 
Treasury was authorized to issue $60,000,000 of notes payable on demand and 
receivable for public dues. They circulated at par but were looked upon with 
suspicion. However, they tided over the financial difficulties of the summer, 
but upon the assembling of Congress in regular session, in the December 
following, it was evident that measures more efficient must be taken to meet the 
rapidly increasing expenses of the Government. A bill was, therefore, pre- 
sented in the House authorizing the issue of $ 1 50,000,000 of notes for circulation, 
to be a legal tender in payment of all debts, public and private, except for 
customs dues and interest on public debt. The measure was received with 
consternation and alarm even by the best friends of the new Republican 
administration, but it became a law February 25, 1862, notwithstanding the 
opposition of such Republicans as Justin S. Morrill, Roscoe Conkling and 
\\ illiam Pitt Fessenden, and of the entire Democratic party. The notes became 
known as legal tenders or greenbacks. No time for their redemption was fixed, 
but they were convertible at par into six per cent, gold-bearing interest bonds, 
authorized by the same act. Before their issue the banks had suspended pay- 
ment of specie for notes and the new bills soon became the standard of values 
as well as the unit of accounts. The courts held their issue constitutional and 
their tender sufficient for the payment of even a pre-existing obligation calling 
for dollars, though only specie dollars existed when the contract was made. 
Their convertibility into bonds, as stated, checked somewhat their immediate 
depreciation, but new issues followed, and when in 1863 the right to convert 
them into interest-bearing bonds ceased, the notes were worth in coin only 
sixty-five. Their limit of issue was fixed at $450,000,000 ; that of fractional 
pieces convertible into legal tenders at $50,000,000. 

Another new form of paper issues was also authorized. In 1863 an act 
was passed by the central government, supplemented by another act in 1864, 
under which banks might be organized, and upon furnishing the Treasurer of 
the United States with bonds of the Government to a limited extent they would 
be entitled to receive therefor circulating notes equal in amount to ninety per 
cent, of the bonds furnished. A tax of ten per cent, per annum was subse- 
quently imposed upon the issues of the State banks, to take effect July 1, 1N65, 
avowedly for the purpose of driving them from circulation. 

These notes were receivable for government dues to the same extent as 
the legal tenders, into which they were convertible at par. Consequently these 
two classes of notes maintained a uniformity of value, though much below that 



LEGAL-TENDER. GREENBACKS. 455 

of specie, and fluctuating daily in comparison with that standard, destroyed all 
stability in values, stimulating speculation, not only in gold itself, but in stocks, 
cotton, grain, and other farm products, until the machinery of exchange was 
little better than a wheel of fortune. 

Certain interest-bearing obligations of the Government were also made 
legal tender, and their use as a bank reserve liberated to that extent an equal 
amount of the legal tenders for circulation, thus further inflating the already 
excessive issues. 

In 1865, at the close of the rebellion, there were outstanding, of all paper 
issues, $983,000,000, having a coin value of $692,000,000, gold being worth in 
paper about 141. At the instance of Hon. Hugh McCulloch, then Secretary 
of the Treasury, Congress, in April, 1866, authorized the retirement of $10,000,- 
000 of legal tenders within six months, and thereafter not more than $4,000,000 
per month. By force of taxation the State issues disappeared, and the interest- 
bearing obligations as they matured were converted into long-time bonds. 

These steps tended to reduce the volume of paper circulation, notwith- 
standing the increase of national bank issues, but on June 30, 1866, gold was 
quoted at 150. The aggregate circulation, however, continued to gradually 
diminish in amount, and in March, 1869, the question having arisen as to the 
currency in which the bonds and notes were payable, the faith of the Nation 
was pledged to pay all interest-bearing obligations in coin, unless by the terms 
of their issue it had been expressly provided that they might be paid in lawful 
money, and also that at the earliest practicable date the legal tender notes 
should be paid in coin. Still, on June 30, 1869. there was outstanding of paper 
issues $756,000,000, the authority for further retirement of the legal tenders 
having been suspended in 1868, leaving these notes in circulation, $356,000,000. 
Gold was then quoted at 137. In the fall of 1S74 a stringency in the money 
market, caused by the financial panic of the previous year, led to the reissue 
of these notes to $383,000,000, which amount was fixed by law as their limit. 
To Congress the country now turned for relief from the long unsettled value 
of its currency. An act, therefore, prepared by a caucus of Republican 
Senators, of which Hon. John Sherman was Chairman, passed both Houses as 
a strictly party measure, and was approved January 14, 1875. 

It provided for the coinage of fractional silver coins and the redemption 
therein of the fractional notes, for the unlimited circulation of National Bank 
notes, and for the retirement of legal tenders to the extent of eighty per cent. 
of any such increase, until only $300,000,000 should remain in circulation, and 
for the redemption of the notes in coin at the Sub-Treasury in New York, on 
and after January 1, 1879. 

To carry into effect these provisions, the Secretary of the Treasury was 
authorized to use any available cash in the Treasury and to issue at par any of 



456 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the bonds authorized by the refunding acts of 1870 and 1S71, and to apply the 
proceeds to the purpose of such redemption. 

For several years the expediency of retaining these notes as part of the 
permanent circulation of the country had been much discussed, and upon the 
question as to their disposition after redemption no unanimity of views was 
reached in the caucus framing the measure, so the matter was purposely left 
open for future legislation. 

In March, 1 S 7 7 , Mr. Sherman, to whom had been intrusted the explanation 
and advocacy of the bill in the Senate, was called to the Treasury. He found 
the fractional notes had been largely redeemed in silver, and that the retirement 
of the legal tenders consequent upon the increase of the bank circulation was 
in satisfactory progress, but that no coin had been accumulated with which to 
redeem the notes on January 1, 1879. Gold was quoted at 106. 

Through an arrangement with certain bankers who were then purchasing 
the Government bonds for refunding, the Secretary promptly sold for resumption 
$15,000,000 of four and one-half per cent, bonds at par, and later in the sum- 
mer £25,000,000 additional of four per cents, at par, the first issue of bonds since 
the war bearing so low a rate of interest. But a series of adverse circumstances 
operated against additional sales of these bonds, and all further steps toward secur- 
ing a fund for resumption were suspended. Gold was now at 103. The continual 
advance in the value of the money standard had embarrassed to a certain 
extent the debtor class, and an outcry against a further enhancement of its value 
was very pronounced. Upon the assembling of Congress in December, thirteen 
bills were introduced the first day for the repeal of the resumption act, and one 
of them passed the House and lacked but two votes of passing the Senate. In 
every direction the outlook was discouraging for the friends of the measure, 
but the Secretary announced to Congress and the country that unless the law 
was repealed he should certainly comply with its provisions and redeem the 
notes as required by law, on and after January 1, 1879. The law was not 
repealed, but an act was passed forbidding the retirement of the notes beyond 
the existing amount, £346,681,016, and requiring their reissue after redemption, 
thus settling a much debated policy. 

In April, 1878, the Secretary went to New York and sold $50,000,000 of 
four and one-half per cents, at 101 net, thus securing in all $90,500,000 in gold 
coin for redemption. With this, and an estimated amount of about $40,000,000 
surplus cash in the Treasury, he believed he could easily redeem all the notes 
presented for that purpose. Notwithstanding the ample preparations, the 
premium on gold did not disappear until December 15th. The 1st day of 
January was Sunday, and no business was transacted. On the following day 
no little anxiety was felt at the Treasury, but in the evening came a dispatch 
showing more gold for notes than notes for gold had been presented. The 



THE CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE. 457 

crisis had passed and resumption was accomplished. An era of enterprise and 
prosperity set in, unparalleled in modern history. Within the next ten years 
following the taxable wealth of the country increased about $780,000,000, an 
amount considerably greater than the total of such wealth in 1850, as shown 
by the returns of the Seventh Census. 

The issue limit of these notes still remains unchanged, the redeemability 
of them in coin unquestioned, and the resumption fund untouched. Meanwhile 
the issues of the national banks have been greatly reduced, the high price of 
the collateral bonds rendering their continuance unprofitable to the banks. 

The experiment of maintaining at par an issue of Government notes, based 
upon a reasonable reserve in specie and further secured by a pledge of the faith 
of the Nation, has proved a success in furnishing a part of the currency of the 
country. The plan will likely attract attention throughout the civilized world, 
for the circulation of no country is upon an entirely satisfactory basis. At 
present a no more economical or satisfactory form of currency exists than these 
notes of the United States. Deprived of their legal-tender quality when not 
redeemable at par with coin, as are the bank notes of England, which quality 
alone can ever make them harmful, but which may prove useful as long as their 
redeemability is maintained, the notes which have already survived the exigencies 
that brought them into existence may prove the money of the future. 



HON. JOHN SHERMAN ON THE CURRENCY OF THE FUTURE. 

The above article was prepared by Mr. Upton upon the recommendation 
of Senator John Sherman, whose hand has shaped the financial legislation of the 
country for the last quarter of a century, and upon its being submitted to him 
he stated that he found it very interesting and deserving of wide circulation, as 
no other measure before Congress could compare with that of the currency in 
its effects upon the business interests of the country ; that it affected every man, 
woman, and child in our broad land, the rich with his investments, the poor with 
his labor. 

At the same time he made the following statement of his views as to the 
future currency of the country. 

The employment of either silver or gold for general purposes of circu- 
lation is growing relatively less every year, in all civilized nations. The use 
of checks in transferring credits from one party to another, the employment 
of clearing-houses in commercial centres to offset the checks against each 
other, to save the labor and risk of individual collections, and lastly, the 
employment of paper notes payable on demand in specie, in lieu of actual 



458 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

specie itself, are modern inventions for facilitating exchanges, and they are 
the greatest labor-saving machines ever brought to human aid. Their use is 
not yet fully understood or appreciated, but they are rapidly revolutionizing 
all methods of exchanges, and this country cannot refuse to recognize^ their 
superiority over the clumsy machinery of the last century. The expansion 
of the use of checks and clearing-houses may be left to the education which 
our rapidly increasing commerce affords. As to the issue of paper notes, 
it is generally admitted that the metals should be supplemented by some 
kind of credit money, to avoid absorbing too much of the actual wealth of 
the country in the machinery of circulation, and the question arises, under 
what authority, in what manner, and to what extent these issues shall be 
made. 

The commerce between the several States is of enormous and unrestricted 
amount, and demands the issue to be uniform in value throughout the country. 
The policy of removing the tax upon the issue of State banks, and allowing 
variegated bills of that character, at best never at par, except in the immediate 
vicinity of their issue, to again flood the country, meets with little favor in 
any section. There is, also, a general feeling that when the option on the 
four per cent, bonds expires, the Government should not issue in their place 
bonds of a lower rate on which national banks may continue their circulation. 

If there is any gain in issuing notes, there is a demand, not without justice, 
that it should be shared in by all the citizens of the Republic, not exclusively by 
the holders of State or National bank stocks. 

To purchase gold or silver bullion and to issue certificates thereon, dollar 
for dollar, would not obviate the great objection to a large part of the present 
circulation, viz.: the useless storing away of too much of the wealth of the 
country in the vaults of the Treasury, a policy, however safe it may be, which is 
expensive, as taking out of productive enterprises a needless amount of capital. 

The employment of the greenback currency as part of the paper currency 
since 1879, based upon about thirty per cent, of gold coin or bullion, and the 
pledge of the faith of the nation to its maintenance at par, has proved satisfactory 
and economical. By its issue the Government has had the use of $246,000,000, 
the excess of the issue over the reserve, for thirteen years, with no charge except 
the insignificant appropriation for the manufacture of new notes to take the 
place of those worn or mutilated. Had the greenbacks been converted at that 
time into four per cent, bonds and other forms of currency substituted as 
demanded by many high in authority, the Government would already have paid 
on such bonds to date about $125,000,000 in interest. At present there is 
outstanding of silver certificates, Treasury notes, gold certificates, and national 
bank notes $770,000,000, and the query arises, why cannot the issue of the green- 
backs be gradually extended so as to take the place of these issues, a reserve 



A UNIFORM MEDIUM. 459 

in specie to be maintained equal to 2 /$ of the entire paper circulation, and the 
faith of the nation to be pledged to keep the notes at par by the sale of bonds, 
the proceeds to be applied to such maintenance whenever necessary. For 
thirteen years greenbacks have maintained a specie value, nobody desiring 
coin for the notes as soon as it was known it could be had upon demand, and 
there is no reason to suppose that a parity of value cannot be maintained for all 
the paper circulation, though sustained in part only by the pledged faith of the 
nation. The amount of circulation needed can be determined only by the 
necessities of business, but with the privileges of redemption at sight an over 
issue of paper would not long remain. 

The metallic reserve might with safety consist of one-half of gold and 
one-half of silver, the latter at its market value, and the notes be redeemed 
either in gold or its equivalent in silver, under such regulations as may be 
deemed necessary to keep them at par and to give no advantage to either 
metal. 

Any loss the Government might sustain therefrom by a depreciation in 
the value of either metal would probably be made more than good from the 
profit in issuing the remaining one-third part of the notes upon the credit of 
the country as represented by bonds, of which the Secretary should have 
unquestioned power to sell a sufficient amount at his discretion. 

A circulation issued by the General Government and thus secured 
would be uniform in value throughout the country ; its notes, alike in design, 
would soon become well known and much preferred to the many kinds now 
in circulation, of which each has a different appearance, a different basis of 
redemption, and of debt-paying power. Such a policy is nothing new. It is 
only the extension of one already tried and which has proved successful, and 
which can be easily expanded to afford all the circulation which the rapidly 
growing needs of the country may require. 







Jflp 

.Jill 



A m 









till 







HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. 
460 



CHAPTER XXV. 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE, A.piD UNIVERSITY 



BY PROFESSOR T. S. DOOLIT-TLE, D.D., LL.D., 
Vice-President Rutgers College. 



The early settlers of America marched toward progress and prosperity 
through the avenues of political independence, obedience to religion, and the 
diffusion of education. Along with the minister for the church they brought the 
master for the school. The school-room, not less than the sanctuary, was to be 
the fortress of the new civilization. But the educational impulse, according to 

Motley, came, even among the colonists of 
New England, more from the Netherlands 
than from old England. The inhabitants 
of the Low Countries were the most 
enlightened people of Christendom. It 
was difficult in the middle of the sixteenth 
century to find, for example, in Antwerp, 
< says an eminent historian, "a child of suffi- 
cient age who could not read, write, and 
| speak at least two languages ; " and another 
j historian says that in all the Low Countries 
! "there was scarcely a peasant who could 
not read." This general diffusion oi 
knowledge was the result oi a school 
system such as England knew nothing ot. 
And hence the conclusions expressed by 
Dr. T. W. Chambers seem to be quite 
just. Here are his words : " It is not an 
unreasonable supposition that Tin: school 
system founded in the New England colonies at an early period was 
suggested by what the Puritan exiles had seen during their twenty years' stay in 
Holland. It is very certain that nothing of the kind was known in their mother 
country. 

461 




PRO] 1 :OR T. S. DOOLITTI.E, D.D., LL.D. 



462 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

" But the scholars and gentlemen who came over in the Mayflower had 
had abundant opportunity to see in the Dutch Republic how closely knowledge 
and religion were bound together, and how firm a foundation was laid for the 
maintenance of liberty and religion when the elements of education were made 
common to all classes." Nor is this all. Education owes a larger debt to the 
colonies constituting the New Netherlands than has usually been acknowledged. 
Professor Herbert B. Adams declares that "our free public-school system, of 
which we are justly so proud, seems to have its beginnings distinctly traceable to 
the earliest life of the Dutch colonies here in America, and to have had its 
prototype in the free schools, in which Holland has led the van of the world." 
It was a part of the charter of the Dutch West India Company that they should 
maintain in their colonies "good and fit preachers, schoolmasters, and comforters 
of the sick." Sometimes, indeed, the same individual filled all three offices, from 
which it may be inferred that the work of education began among the Dutch of 
Manhattan as early as 1626. The Dutch patroons bound themselves to provide 
instruction not only for their own children, but for those of the neighboring 
Indians. 

THE OLDEST SCHOOL IN AMERICA. 

With Wouter Van Twiller, the second Director General of the New Nether- 
lands, came, in 1633, Rev. Everardus Bogardus, for the church, and Adam 
Roelanstan, the first schoolmaster ; and the parochial school over which he 
presided, and which is still carried on by the Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church 
in New York, is now the oldest existing school in America. Moreover, it was 
our first free public school, for it was supported in part by a school-tax of four 
pounds. It was the duty of the teacher not only to instruct in the ordinary 
branches, but especially to train the children in the catechism and religious 
doctrines. Nor was this all. He acted as grave-digger, court-bell ringer, and 
precentor, setting and leading the tunes in the Sabbath worship. 

The Colony of Virginia made preparations as early as 16 19 for the diffusion 
of education, but its Parliamentary grant of 15,000 acres of land and private 
subscriptions, though resulting in the erection of buildings for both a school and 
a college, were, alas ! rendered for a time fruitless by the horrible Indian massacre 
of 1622. In the Bermuda Islands, however, where the population had at this 
date reached the goodly number of 5000, a school had been kept by Richard 
Norwood since 1615, and it was here that Bishop Berkeley intended to found and 
endow a college. 

The town of Boston had not been settled a year when its people, in 1635, 
appointed " Brother Philemon Purmont to become school-master for the teaching 
and nourteuring of children."* And ten years later, John Winthrop wrote thus : 

*The Boston Latin School, established that year, is still alive and flourishing. 



SCHOOLS TN CONNECTICUT. 



463 



" Divers free schools were erected at Roxbury (for the maintenance whereof 
every inhabitant bound some house or land for a yearly allowance forever), 
and at Boston, where they made an order to allow forever fifty pounds to 
the master, and a house, and thirty pounds to an usher, who should also 
teach to read, write and, cypher. Indian children were to be taught freely. 
The charge to be by yearly contribution, either by voluntary allowance, or 
by rate of such as refused, the order being confirmed by the General Court." 

Schools rapidly followed in the other towns. Indeed, the Colonial Court 
compelled parents and masters to see that their children and apprentices 
respectively were taught a 
knowledge of reading English, 
of the laws, and of religion, 
under penalty of fines ; and 
in the case of obdurate ne- 
glect, of having their children 
and apprentices taken from 
them and bound out to others 
who would be responsible lor 
their instruction. 

Nor was Connecticut be- 
hind in her appreciation of 
the advantages conferred by 
the pedagogue. During the 
first year of her existence, 
in 1638, one of her original 
settlers from Boston, Ezekiel 
Cheever, opened a school at 
New Haven. Other schools 
soon multiplied ; but with the 
exception of one grammar 
school supplying instruction 

in Latin, rhetoric, and grammar, etc., they all confined their teaching to reading 
and cyphering. The earliest schools in Rhode Island were one in Newport in 
1640, and another in Providence in 1660. The fact that this colony and also that 
some of the Southern colonies did not hasten to adopt a public school system is 
due to the conviction among their people that the task of imparting education 
and religion to the young was a duty resting not upon the community at all, 
but upon parents and guardians. Throughout the other colonies the schools 
were supported by appropriations of land, by bequests, rents, donations 
and taxation. They were not, however, free. Tuition was exacted for 
every pupil. 




INTERIOR OF hie MEMORIAL HALL, HARVARD UNIVEF ill 



464 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

It is interesting- to note the varied and useful duties, at this period, ot 
the New England schoolmaster. Besides inspiring his pupils to the practice 
of reading, cyphering, and in some instances, of writing, he acted as court- 
messenger, served summonses, conducted certain ceremonial services of 
the church, led the Sunday school choir, rang the bell for public worship, 
digged graves, and performed other occasional duties. 

Massachusetts has the distinguished honor of being the first colony 
to elaborate a common school system enforced by law upon all her towns, 
supported largely by taxation, and offering free tuition to the necessitous. 
Moreover, she raised the standard of scholarship, by ordaining that towns 
having one hundred or more families should provide grammar schools for such 
instruction in Latin, Greek, and mathematics as would enable the pupils 
to enter Harvard University. Idleness and ignorance were regarded as 
public evils, dangerous alike to the Church and the State. This wholesome 
example was soon imitated by Connecticut, which enacted a law making it com- 
pulsory, under penalty of a fine of twenty shillings for each neglect, upon 
parents and masters "to teach, by themselves or others, their children and 
apprentices a knowledge of English, of the capital laws, and of the principles 
of religion. Nor was this all. Every child was to be brought up to some 
honest calling, unless it were fit for one of the professions. In the colony of 
New Haven, parents and masters, after a third warning and fine for neglect. 
were liable to have their children taken from them and bound out to some one 
who would both school them and train them to a trade. New Hampshire, after 
becoming independent of Massachusetts, in 1693, began at once to support 
schools "by equal rate and assessment on all the inhabitants." Maine, aiso, 
on becoming a separate State, in 1820, naturally undertook the same fostering 
care of common and grammar schools which she had learned whilst being a 
part of Massachusetts. 

Nor was the teacher's office without high honor in New England. The 
choicest men, often graduates of Harvard, were selected to fill it. " In the 
churches they had special pews provided for their use beside those of magis- 
trates' and the deacon's family." They ranked with the clergyman and the 
physician ; but women were, we are sorry to add, excluded, as a rule, from this 
highly respected and useful profession. The pedagogue was, however, well 
worked in those days. He knew nothing of vacations, long or short, for he 
taught twelve months in a year. Nor was his pay large. Previous to 1800 it 
varied from four to ten dollars per month with board thrown in. Mistresses, 
when so fortunate as to obtain a situation, were cut down often to fifty cents 
per week; though sometimes they received one dollar and a half a week. 
Almost the only text-books used before 1665 were Richard Mather's Cate- 
chism, the New Testament, and the Psalter containing the Psalms, Proverbs, 
the Sermon on the Mount, and the Nicene Creed. 



THE FRIENDS, OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



465 



But New York was the peer of New England in her ideas of the utility and 
glory of education. At her surrender to the English, in 1664, she possessed "a 
regular school in every town, with more or less permanent teachers." The new 
English rulers allowed these Dutch schools to languish, because they exerted 
their influence in favor of a non-conforming church. The Dutch congregation 
in the city of New York, managed, however, to keep their parochial school 
running, and it flourishes, as already noted, until this day. About twenty years 
after the English occupation, "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel " 




joo"^' 



MLMUK1AL HALL, HARVARD COLLEGE. 



founded the Trinity School in the city, and subsequently more than twenty 
others in the colony. One of these was finally developed into King's College, 
now known as Columbia University. 

Nor WERE THE FRIENDS OF PENNSYLVANIA 

without the impulse for the intellectual enlightenment that always accompanies 
morality. The Penn Charter School, established in 1698, in Philadelphia, was 
notable for its ample provisions for all. Girls as well as boys, nay, even servants, 
were admitted, and though a moderate tuition was exacted from the rich, yet 
the children of the poor were instructed gratis. Moreover, no applicant was 
excluded because of denominational differences. Under the guidance of Dr. 
3° 



466 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Franklin and others, constituting the " German Society," schools were organized 
which performed immense service for the children of German settlers. Owing 
to the fact that the population of Pennsylvania embraced Hollanders and 
English, Catholics and Protestants, Churchmen and Quakers, and Swedes, the 
schools of this province were neither so numerous nor so well sustained as in 
the other colonies ; and yet there were private and denominational schools, as, 
for example, among the Moravians and Friends. A remarkable teacher of this 
period was Christopher Dock, of Germantown. His devotion to his pupils, as 
well as wisdom, had won for him the reputation of being a "veritable Pesta- 
loz2i." He taught music, used the blackboard, and devised a method of 
numbers quite his own. 

In New Jersey, too, the people sought to perpetuate free institutions by 
providing for the mental and moral growth of the young. Newark in 1683 was 
the happy possessor of schools, whilst the town of Burlington rejoiced in a per- 
manent school fund obtained by selling or renting the land of an island in the 
Delaware River. In 1693 a general law authorized the majority of any town 
to maintain a school, "even to the distress of the goods and chattels" of all the 
citizens. Inasmuch, however, as the vote of the majority was uncertain, the 
results of this law, which certainly contained the germ of our entire free-school 
system, were not for a century so great or satisfactory as might have been 
expected. The educational services of Rev. William Tennent merit the most 
grateful and distinguished commemoration. He was an eminent scholar who, 
besides being proficient in several languages, spoke Latin with accurate fluency 
and delight. His "Log College" at Nehaminy, where for twenty years he 
inspired young men with a noble ambition for the higher life of letters and of a 
sanctified heart, was the germ out of which grew the College of New Jersey at 
Princeton. Such a benefactor leaves his impress on generations. 

The idea of diffusing intelligence through the common school was not 
popular in the Southern Colonies. Governor Berkeley, of Virginia, in 1 67 1 
informed the English Commissioners of Foreign Plantations that every man 
according to his ability instructed his children, but added : "I thank God there 
are no free schools nor printing presses, and I hope we shall not have them 
these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and 
sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best 
of governments. God keep us from both ! " That these words reflected the 
general sentiment seems evident from the circumstance that only isolated and 
transient schools existed throughout the South before the Revolution. Such 
young people as were educated at all were trained under parents or tutors at 
home until prepared to be sent to some institution abroad. A notable excep- 
tion, however, to this rule is found in the Dorchester Seminary of South Caro- 
lina. This excellent grammar school, with four others of like character, was 



TEACHERS AND TEXT-BOOKS. 



467 



the offspring of a colony of Congregationalists from Massachusetts. And it is 
claimed that they afforded " the best classical instruction," as they were assur- 
edly bulwarks of piety and good citizenship. Maryland could boast of a similar 
institution at Battle Creek. And hence it would appear the South was not 
antagonistic to the academy, but rather to free common schools. Nor, injustice 
to Governor Berkeley, must it be forgotten that he gave generously to the sup- 
port of private academies. Indeed, the idea of a free school was too often, in 
our early history, and not only in the South, but also in the North, associated 
with the odium of a pauper school, to meet with general favor. Many well- 
meant endeavors to extend the privileges of ordinary education to poor children 
were frustrated because their parents were too proud to profit by them. 

With noble exceptions the 
teachers of the last century were 
of a low grade. Many of them 
were foreign adventurers, in- 
temperate, and sometimes guilty 
of worse vices. In Maryland it 
was said that two-thirds of them 
were immigrants that came over 
either as "indentured servants, 
or as transported felons " ! 
Neither were the text-books of 
a high order, the Bible and 
catechism always excepted. The 
New England Primer was a cate- 
chism and spelling-book com- 
bined. The New England Psalm 
Book was also used. Here are 
some that followed, mostly after 
the Revolution : the Dilworth 

Spelling Book, John Woolman's First Book for Children, Daniel Fleming's 
Universal Spelling Book, A Speller and Brief Grammar, by one Pierce, and, 
above all, Webster's Spelling Book, published in 1783. Two years later 
came his Third Reader — "An American Selection in Reading and Speaking; 
calculated to Improve the Mind and Refine the Taste of Youth ; and also to 
Instruct them in the Geography, History, and Politics of the United States. 
To which are prefixed Rules in Elocution and Directions for Giving 
Expression to the Principal Passions of the Mind." Near the opening of the 
present century appeared Bingham's "American Preceptor," "The Columbian 
Orator," "Murray's English Reader," Chipman's "American Moralist," 
Stanford's "The Art of Reading," Goldsmith's "Roman History," and 




THE GREAT DUME AND TELESCOPE OF LICK OloLKYA I OR V, 
CALIFORNIA. 



468 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Webster's "Account of the Historical Transactions of the United States 
after the Revolution." Hodder's " Arithmetic, or that Necessary Art Made 
Easy ; being Explained in a Way Familiar to the Capacity of any that 
Desire to Learn it in a Little Time," was in use from 17 19 until supplanted by 
Pike's "Arithmetic," with its forty pages of algebra for academies, in 1785. 
Not long after came Daboll's " Arithmetic" and Dilworth's "School-Master's 
Assistant." Latin was taught by Bailey's "English and Latin Grammar" 
and by Cheeven's " Latin Accidence." The first English Grammar ever used 
in the Boston schools was "The Young Lady's Accidence," by Caleb 
Bingham. This was followed by South' s "Short Introduction to English" 
and Lindley Murray's famous "Grammar." It is amusing to reflect that 
"Universal Geography " was presented by Jedediah Morse in a little i8mo 
book containing just four maps, whilst Dwight's " Catechetical System of 
Geography" had a limited circulation. 

It is certainly as discreditable as it was anomalous, that in the new life 
and civilization inaugurated by our fathers on this continent the education of 
their daughters should have been so sadly neglected. Although girls were 
admitted to the Penn Charter School at Philadelphia and to the Moravian 
school at Bethlehem, Pa., yet as a rule they were remorselessly excluded from 
almost all others. Sometimes this deficiency was sought to be remedied by 
affording them a little instruction during short summer terms or at noon 
hours between the regular sessions. Afterwards a double-headed system 
was devised in Boston to instruct both sexes, but to keep them entirely 
separate. In the morning the girls would learn writing in one building and 
the boys in another, while in the afternoon they would exchange places 
or buildings in order to take their lessons in reading-, grammar, anc ] 
arithmetic. But even with this extraordinary caution against social dissipa- 
tion between the brothers and somebody else's sisters, the latter were not 
allowed to attend school more than six months of the year, whilst the former 
were under the master for twelve months. 

Thus far only elementary schools, with here and there an academy, have 
been under review ; but our fathers were, in many sections of the land, pro- 
foundly solicitous to provide the higher learning belonging to the college and 
university. To enable their sons to become fitted for the professions of medicine, 
law, and especially of theology, was their hearts' desire. And to accomplish 
this they displayed rare generosity and often heroic self-sacrifice. Not six years 
after the settlement of Boston her representatives voted to tax the people 400 
pounds for the foundation of a high school, which became subsequently Harvard 
College — an instance of enlightened public spirit without a parallel, unless it be 
in the petition by the citizens of Leyden to William of Orange for a university 
instead of for the pecuniary profits of an annual fair. The noble motive under- 



EARLY DAYS OF HARVARD. 



469 



lying this act was expressed in the words that " the light of learning might not go 
out, nor the study of God's Word perish." 

The inspiration of this godly motive was so commanding as to lead John 
Harvard, after whom the college was named, to contribute to it one-half of his 
estate of 1700 pounds and all of his library. Certain magistrates subscribed in 
the aggregate 200 pounds. Others gave of their necessities. One brought 
a number of sheep ; 
another nine shillings' 
worth of cloth ; another 
a ten shilling pewter 
flagon ; others, a fruit 
dish, a sugar spoon, a 
silver-tipped jug, one 
great salt, one small 
trencher salt, etc. Such 
gifts carry their own 
hsson of ardent and 
disinterested love. 
The course of study 
was shaped mainly to 
prepare students for 
the orthodox ministry 
of the time. It in- 
cluded logic, ethics, 
politics, a little of 
physics and botany, 
arithmetic and geom- 
etry, Greek, Hebrew, 
Chaldaic, Syriac, and 
the Bible. Latin was 
not pursued, but was 
spoken under compul- 
sion in place of Eng- jH 
lish. Prayers were at- 
tended at six in the 

morning and at five in the afternoon, when students were required " to read some 
portion of the Old Testament out of Hebrew into Greek, and the New Testa- 
ment of English into Greek, after which one of the Bachelors or Sophisters 
logically analyzed what was read." Lectures were given on history, but mental 
philosophy was excluded. The College often experienced financial depression 
and hard struggles, until gradually new friends and larger gifts lifted it into the 
first place among American universities. 




LLEGE CHAl'EL. 



4/0 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



The second college — that of William and Mary — grew out of a zeal to 
supply a ministry for the Episcopal Church, as Harvard had to supply clergymen 
for the Congregational Church. A similar aim and similar experiences, too, 
of difficulties marked most of our collegiate institutions prior to 1S00. The 
following table shows the order of their origin, location, and affiliations : — 



Institutions. 



Harvard. 

William and Mary, .... 

Yale, 

Princeton, 

University of Pennsylvania,* . 

Columbia 

lirown, 

Queen's (Rutgers) 

Dartmouth, 

Hampden-Sydney, 

Washington and Lee, .... 
Washington University, . . . 

Dickinson, 

St. John's, 

Nashville,"- 

Georgetown 

University of North Carolina,* 
University of Vermont,"' . . 
University of East Tennessee, 

Williams 

Bowdoin 

Union, 

Middleburv, 

Frederic College, 



State. 



Massachusetts, . . 

Virginia, 

Connecticut, . . . 
New Jersey, . . . 
Pennsylvania, . . . 
New York, .... 
Rhode Island, . . 
New Jersey, . . . 
New Hampshire, . 

Virginia, 

Virginia, 

Maryland, .... 
Pennsylvania, . . . 
Maryland, .... 
Tennessee, . . 
District of Columbia, 
North Carolina, . . 
Vermont, .... 
Tennessee, .... 
Massachusetts, . . 

Maine, 

New York, .... 
Vermont, .... 
Maryland, .... 



1637 
1693 
1701 
1746 
1749 
1754 
1764 
1766 
1769 
1776 
17S2 
17S2 
17S3 
1784 
1785 
17S9 
17S9 
1791 
1792 
1793 
1794 
1/95 
1795 
1796 



Congregational. 

Episcopal. 

Congregational. 

Presbyterian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Episcopal. 

Baptist. 

Reformed (Dutch). 

Congregational. 

Presbyterian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Methodist Episcopal. 

Non sectarian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Roman Catholic. 

Non-sectarian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Congregational. 

Non-sectarian. 

Non-sectarian. 

Congregational. 

Non-sectariaYi. 



* State. 

In the early part of this century public sentiment sprang forward with a 
new and decided impulse toward education. The thought of the communities 
crystallized itself in the noble words of Jefferson : " The diffusion of light and 
education is the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, 
promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of mankind." Many new 
colleges were founded, whilst new subjects of study, necessitating new profes- 
sorships, were introduced into the old ones. In some of the States, as in 
Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Kentucky, Louisiana, permanent school 
funds were created by the sale of public lands. In others, as Rhode Island, 
Vermont, Pennsylvania, annual legislative appropriations were made for schools. 
The proceeds of legalized lotteries were in many places devoted to the same 
object, including academies and colleges. Bank tax, surplus revenues, excise 
tax, and venders' license, Congressional land gifts, and many other means have 
contributed to education. Up to 1S76 the educational land-grants of the 



EDUCA TIONAL DEVELOPMENT. 



471 



United States amounted to nearly eighty millions of acres, equal to more than 
the land of Great Britain and Ireland ! The sums now expended from these 
resources and from taxation range in the different States from three to thirteen 
million dollars annually. 

Three great ideas were gradually developed, viz. : that some education 
should be provided for every child ; that the State must support the schools, 
and that the schools must be brought under intelligent and systematic super- 
vision. In some places attendance upon the public school by children not 
already in a private school has been made compulsory. State, county, and city 









coi.i.ki ;k football, A touch-down. 



superintendents have extended their inspection beyond financial measures and 
buildings to the subjects and methods of study, the art of discipline and instruc- 
tion, as well as to the intellectual qualifications and moral character of teachers. 
The number and variety of the subjects taught have been immensely extended. 
The elementary instruction in cities now embraces reading, spelling, writing, 
drawing, music, language lessons, English grammar, United States history, 
geography, arithmetic, physical culture, natural science, including physiology, 
morals and manners, civil government ; whilst the high schools provide full 
classical courses in Latin, Greek, algebra, geometry, etc., preparatory to 
entrance into college, besides commercial and scientific courses, German, etc. 



472 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The multiplication, .too, of public schools has been enormous. It requires 
216,330 houses to accommodate them, and 124,929 male teachers and 227,302 
female teachers to instruct them. There are over twelve millions of pupils on 
their rolls, whilst over eight millions are in daily average attendance. The 
value of their property amounts to over $323,000,000, and their total annual 
revenue, from taxes, permanent funds, and other sources swells to over 
$132,000,000. There are also many excellent private schools with over one 
million scholars. Such figures are full of richest promise for the future stability 
and happiness of the Republic. 

Xor is this all. Various associations and institutes have been organized to 
secure proper educational legislation and to enlighten the teachers themselves 
on many vital points connected with their work. 

Normal and other schools have sprung into existence whose object it is to 
prepare young men and women for the profession of teachers. In 129 schools 
having normal classes there are no less than 22,618 persons pursuing the science 
and art of teaching, of whom 71 per cent, are women. 

There have been organized within recent years some 233 business colleges, 
which aftord from tour to six months' courses in penmanship, book-keeping, 
arithmetic, banking, letter-writing, stenography, telegraphy, etc., to 64,858 
attendants. A new departure has also been taken by the establishment of 
eighteen manual training schools, having over 3000 students, who are learning, 
along with primary studies, drawing, wood-turning, designing, clay modeling, 
carpentry, and the use of tools, preparatory to self-support in one of the trades 
Moreover, some 1248 persons are in thirty-three nurses' training schools, 
acquiring the skill to enable them, at good wages, to care for the sick and 
helpless. 

THE FIRST WOMEN 

to receive a college degree in this country were three graduates of Oberlin in 
1841 : but now there are 198 institutions for the higher instruction of women, 
having 26,915 students.* The reproach that our fathers did not desire the 
mental improvement of their daughters is not likely to fall upon this generation. 
Academies have risen all over the land until, if secondary schools be ranked 
with them, they number 1324, and have 146,521 pupils, of whom over 37,000 
are preparing for admission to our colleges, either classical or scientific. In 
many instances the academy has advanced to a level of the former college, 
whilst the college has pushed on to the introduction of a wide variety of subjects 
seldom or never heard of in our earlier history. The colleges of liberal arts have 
reached the great number of 384, having 5422 professors and instructors anil 

* Among these institutions are such admirable colleges as Mt. Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, 
Wellesley, and Packer. 



RANGE OF STUDIES. 



473 



86,996 students, of whom 1358 are resident graduates. Many of these are 
young women, since nearly two-thirds of all the colleges now admit girls as well 
as boys. Besides the regular curriculum — generally comprising Latin, Greek, 
German, French, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, practical surveying, draught- 
ing, differential and integral calculus, chemistry, botany, electricity, physics, 
natural history, astronomy, physiology, zoology, biology, English language and 
literature, rhetoric, logic, mental and moral philosophy, history, political 
economy, constitutional law, the English Bible, civics, etc. — there are in many 




THE LIBRARY, VI 



of these institutions extensive elective courses for the further pursuit of several 
of the branches above-named and many more beyond them. Indeed, the elect- 
ive system often begins with the junior year and allows great freedom of 
choice during the last two years of undergraduate life. Among these electives 
are Hebrew, Syriac, Sanscrit, and even Chinese, as at Harvard. Cornell Univer- 
sity was founded with the expressed intention of furnishing instruction in any 
field which any youth may desire to cultivate. Eor the encouragement of 
original investigation eighteen of the universities and colleges offer to their first 



474 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

scholars the benefits of 152 Fellowships. Harvard, for example, has 22, and 
Johns Hopkins and Clark universities 20 each, and Princeton 10. 

Nor are our young" men limited any longer to the old-fashioned classical 
college. Congress, by a princely appropriation from the public domain, has 
enabled each of the States to establish one or more Agricultural Colleges, 
whose curricula are adapted especially to develop ability for the pursuit of 
the industrial and mechanic arts, as well as for the enrichment of the soil, the 
production of crops, and the proper care of flocks and herds. At the same 
time the liberal culture derived from an acquaintance with rhetoric, logic, 
mental and moral philosophy, mathematics, modern languages, and various 
departments of natural science, is united with the four years' agricultural 
course. To meet, however, the demand of those not able to spend so 
long a time, shorter courses, and systems of popular lectures in chemistry 
as applied in agriculture, in entomology, in biology, and the like, have been 
adopted. In the 48 Agricultural Colleges there 9621 students. 

AGRICULTURAL SCHOi I] S. 

In addition to the above, Agricultural Experiment Stations, sustained by 
both the General Government and the States, are earnestly engaged in 
investigating the causes of insect ravages, of potato rot, of cereal and fruit 
blights, and their remedies, of the nature of soils and fertilizers, the elements 
of milk, and the food best adapted to increase its quantity and quality, and the 
like. The results of these deeply interesting scientific and economic discoveries 
are widely distributed in reports and by the press, with the effect of making our 
rural population far more discerning and fertile of resources than formerly. To 
redeem the plow and the hoe from the hand of ignorance, will be to augment 
vastly the wealth of our farms. 

Another notable advance in the intellectual life of the country is evinced in 
the creation and ample success of our theological seminaries. Before the Revo- 
lution certain studies as a preparation for the ministry formed a subordinate 
part of the literary college. These studies, with many and broad additions, com- 
prising, altogether, Hebrew, Chaldaic, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, church history, 
didactic, polemic, and pastoral theology, hermeneutics, Biblical criticism, and 
preaching exercises, have been exalted into the basis for 141 independent theo- 
logical seminaries, each one under the patronage and care of some particular 
denomination. They have 6989 candidates for the pulpit, and are expressive of 
the doctrines and life of the various sects. 

Nor are the other professions without their own distinctive methods. The 
Law is represented by 52 colleges, with 3906 students ; Medicine, of the regu- 
lar order, by 92 colleges, with 12,238 students; and Homoeopathy by 14 col- 
leges, with 1159 students. There are 



INCREASING AGENCIES FOR ENLIGHTENMENT. 475 

pupils; and 72 institutions for deaf mutes, with 8156 pupils; and 26 Dental 
colleges, with 1835 students; and 30 Pharmaceutical schools, with 2812 stu- 
dents ; and 7 Veterinary schools, with 345 students ; and 9 Eclectic schools of 
Medicine, with 669 students ; and 50 Reform schools, with 19,790 inmates ; and 
colored public schools in the former slave States, having 1,213,092 pupils. 

Evening schools and summer schools, of which the notable one at Chau- 
tauqua is the finest, and the introduction quite recently of university extension 
lectures in cities and smaller towns, are wise and useful agencies for the diffusion 
of knowledge. In short, public sentiment bristles with interest in all affairs 




THE DREXEI. INSTITUTE, PHILADELPHIA. 



connected with the minds and hearts of the young. Numerous journals and 
magazines of education have been organized, and in many instances have 
obtained wide circulation. National meetings of the leading masters in school, 
academy, and college are annually held for discussions on the aims, duties, 
privileges and tremendous influence of the guides of youth. The perpetuitv 
and prosperity of the Great Republic are clearly recognized as bound up with 
the intelligence and morality of its citizens. 

An exceedingly popular and effective educational movement, known as 
The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, grew, in 1878, out of the 
"Chautauqua Assembly" which had been originated in 1S74 by Dr. J. H. 



476 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Vincent and Lewis Miller for the purpose of conveying systematic instruction 
to Sunday-school teachers. Along the shore of Chautauqua Lake, in the 
southwestern part of New York, this organization holds its annual summer 
sessions in the midst of beautiful grounds comprising 165 acres, and adorned 
with over 500 picturesque cottages, halls, and an amphitheatre with seats for 
5000 hearers. Besides the summer sessions, which are thronged with many 
thousands, there are local circles scattered all over the Union whose members 
carry on various courses of reading or study, requiring four years for 
completion, superintended by regular officers and rewarded by suitable 
diplomas. Between two and three hundred thousand persons are thus 
annually stimulated to make up the lack of collegiate training, or, having had 
that to pursue post-graduate branches. Another department of this institu- 
tion rises to the dignity of a "College of Liberal Arts," with an able faculty 
which, after affording instruction by correspondence and requiring rigid 
examinations, confers, by the legislative authority of the State, the regular 
collegiate degrees. It is needless to say that vast multitudes are thus 
induced by this beneficent and helpful agency to make a good use of their 
time in seeking knowledge, who otherwise would be left in idleness. 

Another agency for the dissemination of knowledge, from which large results 
are expected, has recently been begun under the name of University Extension. 
The professors of our colleges are endeavoring to reach the masses by giving 
lectures in the cities and villages within reaching distance of their respective 
institutions. The lectures embrace such subjects as astronomy, chemistry, 
botany, agricultural processes, political and social science, architecture, language, 
etc. Any one is at liberty to attend the lectures at a trifling cost. Indeed, they 
are substantially free. But in addition, regular classes are formed for the 
systematic prosecution of certain departments, and certificates are issued, after 
due examinations, stating the degree of proficiency attained as well as the 
subjects mastered. The legislature of New York appropriated $10,000 last 
year to be expended in this way under the direction of the regents of the 
University. Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, 
Rutgers, Princeton and other colleges have already entered upon this fruit- 
bearing work. 

The University of the State of New York, composed of all the incorporated colleges and 
academies and academical departments of public schools, was instituted May 1, 1784. It is 
governed by a Board of twenty-three Regents, of whom the Governor, the Lieutenant-Governor, 
the Secretary of State, and Superintendent of Public Instruction are ex-officio members, whilst the 
remaining nineteen are chosen by the legislature in the same manner as United States Senators. Its 
object is the promotion of higher education by establishing colleges and academies and by disbursing 
annually §106,000 appropriated by the State to those institutions which are found, after due inspec- 
tion and an examination of their pupils, to be worthy of aid. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 



THE FAR\4S OK THE NATION. 



FROM the time when the first free home 
was builded on Plymouth Rock, and no 
king, no tax, no petty tyrant, nor grasping 
landlord met the venturesome home- 
seeker, America has offered, from the 
length and breadth and fullness of her 
possessions, the land upon which all 
wanderers on this shifting desert of 
circumstance may erect their altars and 
worship their God according to the dic- 
tates of their own consciences. No other 
country in the world offers such induce- 
ments as America. Its great home privi- 
leges extend from the ocean of storms 
to the ocean of peace, from the land of 
snows to the land of the orange. 

There are two instincts which impel 
the foreigner to cast his lot with that of 
a new country. The love of home, the 
desire to have his own fireside where 
he may set up his own household gods, 
will always be the strongest feeling 
among civilized people. But there is 
another feeling that is stronger often 
than patriotism — the desire of posses- 
sion, which may take the form of greed 
for land. Those vast territories of unoccupied land which the country continues 
to offer to the resident of the New World will probably all be dealt out in 
less than half a century, so mighty has become the tide of immigration. The 
qualifications for ownership are that the applicant must be twenty-one years of 
age, or at the head of a family, and a citizen, or one who has signified his inten- 

477 




A PLANTATION GATEWAY. 
r to the Estate of William Byrd.at We stove 



478 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

tion ol becoming such. Land to the amount of 160 acres, a quarter-section, 
may be had by the payment of $1.20 per acre, or if 80 acres or less, at $2.50 
per acre. After live years' cultivation, conditioned by a residency during six 
months of the year, the holder or his family is entitled to a patent conferring 
full ownership upon the holder. If the homesteader has served as a soldier 
or sailor during the war, (or a period of ninety days or longer, the time of 
actual service is deducted from the full time required for preemption, and 
is equivalent to settlement, lie is further allowed six months' time after 
filing his declaration and locating his homestead before beginning settlement. 
The soldier's family are entitled to the benefits given soldiers. Every advan- 
tage is given to the homesteader. If one-sixteenth of the land is under 
good timber cultivation, and certain requirements in the way of planting 
have been met, the holder is entitled to receive patent for his land upon 
application after three years' occupancy. The homesteader is further pro- 
tected h\ the law which forbids the seizures of homestead lands for prior 
debt. The objects of the Government in thus allotting public lands are to 
make her citizens contented by giving them the opportunity of establishing 
homes and to encourage agriculture, which must be every nation's chief 
resource. No one can complain th.it he does not find in America abundant 
opportunity to collect the living which the world owes him. 

Less than two fifths of the land in the United States is under cultivation, 
the improved land being about 365,300,000 acres, and the vacant public lands 
amounting to 579,664,683 acres. Aside from other natural resources, the 
wealth of timber and mineral lands extending over thousands of square 
miles, there are fully fifteen hundred thousand square miles of arable land in the 
United States, ami her agricultural resources, if fully developed, would 
support .1 billion people. fapan, with her 48,000,000 acres, supports a popu- 
lation of .) 1,000,000 on a soil whose limit of cultivation was reached 2000 
years ago. In that country of fully developed resources there is an average 
of one acre to four persons, while in the United States there is an average of 
eight acres to one person. With a land rich in resource, with the advantages 
of modern machinery, and the benefits of increasing knowledge in the science 
of farming, our agricultural possibilities are almost limitless. There are 
2,115,135 square miles west of the Mississippi and 851,865 cast. The 
greater portion of the former belonged to the American desert, which is 
receding rapidly before the advance of civilization ami will soon become 
mythical. Even that extensive territory in Nebraska and Dakota known 
.1 , the Bad hands, in distinction from the adjoining fertile regions, and the 
Staked I 'lain of Texas, form a grazing country abounding in valleys and 
fertile districts. Cultivation of the soil increases rainfall, and artesian wells 
that overflow help to make the lands arable. Hut without irrigation and 



Tllli GREAT GRAIN HARVESTS. 



479 



artificial moisture there are vast tracts thai would produce from 40 to 50 
bushels ol wheat and 70 to 80 bushels of corn |>er acre. 

It may not be true that a nation's history can be read in her agricultural 
machines, but they show in a great measure the development made in agri- 
culture, both as an industry anil as a science. The modern farmer, particu- 
larly if he is progressive and has a commercial instinct, is ready to make use 
of all the scientific methods that are offered if he sees a possible chance ol 
improving his land, his crops, and 
his income. I ie is not slow to 
learn that irrigation warms and 
lightens cold and heavy soils, and 
that the utilization of the subsoil 
hastens the harvest by several 
weeks. The increase in crops 
every year is due to intelligent 
farming as well as to an increasing 
number of improved acres for 
farm lands. 

The most important ol our 
American crops are corn and 
v heat. The greal bulk ol corn is 
used at home, and the shipments 
vary according to the home de 
mand. The foreign demand lor 
the past twenty years has not 
■ 1 1 1 Ard 3.9 per cent, ol the pro 
duction. The largest rate ol pro 
duction is in the ( )hio and Mis 
souri River valleys, but it is grown 
successfully in every part ol the 
country except at high elevations. 
The highest value per acre is in 
New Hampshire and the lowest in 
South Carolina, where the yield is 
low, although prices are high. No 
corn, lor while it is one ol tl 
depends upon the season. 

The price of wheat is regulated largely by the foreign market, the home 
demand affecting it-only slightly. During ten years the average yield per acre 
has not varied one-third of a bushel. The banner wheat-growing States an 
Minnesota and the Dakotas, while Kansas and California come next in rank. 




BAGGING WOOL I "I! rRANSPORTATION. 

iroduct has a greater local variation than 
simplest crops as regards cultivation, much 



4 8o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

While there has been a gradual decrease in the yield of oats since 1889, 
there has been a steady increase in demand, affected somewhat by a growing 
consumption of the grain for human food. The interchangeable use of oats and 
corn regulates the values of each in a degree. The average yield for a series 
of years has been twenty-seven bushels to the acre. The range of value 
per acre is from $18 or $19 in Colorado, to $4.50 or $5 in North Carolina, de- 
pending upon the yield and the cost for transportation. A crop that is not 
grown much in this country is rye. It is a crop for poor soils, and its value per 
acre is from $11 to $13. In the South it is grown for winter pasturage 
rather than for seed. The average yield per acre, for ten years, has been 
26.6 bushels. 

The potato crop, a never-failing one in this country, will always be an 
important staple industry. In Idaho, where the soil is particularly favorable to 
the culture of this plant, 500 bushels have been the average per acre. Nearly 
every soil is suited to its growth. 

Tobacco has always been one of the chief crops from the time it was 
exchanged by the early immigrants for wives, and from the first it has been a 
regular export. The chief tobacco regions are in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennes- 
see, North Carolina, and Maryland, while it is grown also in Connecticut and in 
certain portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other States. The 
yield in Kentucky is steadily increasing, and this State now has 39.62 per cent, 
of the total acreage, besides producing over 45 per cent, of the entire crop 
The seed-leaf varieties are produced more in the Northern States, while farther 
south the manufacturing and export varieties predominate. 

It is often profitable for the farmer to cultivate fodder in the seasons unfav- 
orable to the regular crops. The representative constituent of hay is timothy, 
mixed more or less with other varieties of grass. In Texas, the land of the 
enormous hay farms, the famous mesquite and the native prairie grass, growing 
ten or twelve inches high, very juicy and fine-speared, make the best hay in the 
world. If carefully protected from cattle and allowed to grow, it is sufficiently 
hardy to choke out the weeds. In Arizona and parts of California, wheat, 
barley, and winter rye are cultivated for forage. The hardier varieties of 
sorghum and the early spring or winter grains may always be relied upon for 
fodder. 

The successful cultivation of cotton depends upon certain meteorological 
conditions which the Northern climate lacks. During the first period in 
the growth of the plant, tropical conditions — moisture in the soil from frequent 
rains, an invariable high temperature, hot sun, with little wind — will reduce 
evaporation and contribute to the hardy growth of the plant. During the 
second period, which is the period of fruition, the opposite conditions are 
necessarv, both in relation to soil and climate, to arrest the growth of 



77? UCK-FARMING. 



481 



the stalk and develop the boll. So much depends upon these external 
conditions to produce a fine grade ot cotton. The best quality is produced 
on the coast and low-lands. The fibre grown in the pine belt is coarser 
ami has a lower value for manufacturing purposes. 

Statistics of the great harvests of 1891 show that 2,075,000,000 
bushels of corn were produced, 588,000,000 bushels of wheat, 758,000,000 
bushels of oats, 80,000,000 bushels of barley, 34,000,000 bushels of rye, 
14,000,000 bushels of buck- 
wheat, 225,000,000 bushels 
of potatoes, with a total of 
3,774.000,000 bushels. Also 
523,000,000 pounds of to- 
bacco were raised, 44,430,- 
000 tons of hay, and 8,000,- 
000 bales of cotton. The 
on receipts were the 
largest since the year i860. 
While market garden- 
ing may be carried on near 
local markets, where the 
producer often disposes of 
his goods to the consumer, 
truck-farming is usually car- 
ried on at a greater distance 
from the local points, on a 
greater scale. The total 
number of acres under culti- 
vation for truck-farming is 
534,400, with a total value 
of $76,517,155. In the dis- 
trict of New York and Phila- 
delphia, nearly 109,000 acres 
are cultivated. Not far from 

one hundred million dollars are invested in the industry, and much employ- 
ment is afforded to women and children. The advantages to be derived 
from the industry are that nearly all vegetables may be had during the 
year, since the railroad facilities have made it possible to convey perishable 
products to remote markets in a short time. Florida and the regions of 
the Lower Mississippi Valley supply the Eastern and Central cities in the early 
spring and late fall, and California supplies the Western cities. During 
midsummer the immediate neighborhoods supply the cities. 




ENTRANC] TO \ COTTON-YARD. NEW ORLEANS. 



482 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

A partial failure of any of the crops does not signify that the cities shall 
not be supplied from other sources. About the only products received from 
California in Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are new potatoes, cauliflower, 
cabbage, garlic, and tomatoes. The more perishable vegetables cannot be sent 
such a distance. New England supplies the Eastern markets even in the early 
and late season with such products as are profitable even when raised in hot- 
houses. California has the advantage over other States, for in addition to a soil 
that grows every vegetable, she has a climate that does not endanger her winter 
vegetables by frost. Michigan supplies the Chicago and middle Western mar- 
kets with a great proportion of their produce, while Charleston, Savannah, and 
Jacksonville ship enormous quantities of truck to New York several times a 
week. During the census year of 1890 an estimate shows that the value of the 
vegetable crop was $5,773,476.25. 

The Colonial records show that early in the seventeenth century the pro- 
duction of plants brought from the mother country was "from seeds and by bud- 
ding, grafting, and layering. In the records of the Massachusetts Company a 
memorandum of March 16, 1629, shows that slips for vine planters were pro- 
vided, and stores of all kinds of fruits, and a letter from George Fenwick, of 
Saybrook, Conn., to Governor Winthrop acknowledged the receipt of trees for 
which he had evidently sent. Nurseries and botanic gardens were established, 
later, about the middle of the last century, at Flushing, L. I., which for more 
than a hundred years were continued by the descendants of William Prince, the 
original owner ; and another is on record as existing near Charleston, S. C, about 
1760. A premium of ^10 was awarded to Thomas Young, of Oyster Bay, in 
176S, by the Society for Promotion of Arts. 

The matter of census inquiry in regard to nurseries was taken up in 1891, 
and but little recorded data were found to aid in the work. The approximated 
figure's show that about 4510 nurseries are now flourishing in the United States, 
occupying 172,806 acres of land and valued at $41,978,835.80. There are 
employed 45,657 men and 2279 women for propagating and cultivating trees 
and plants, with a total capital invested of $52,425,669.51. The estimates show 
that 95,025.42 acres are comprised in these nurseries, and that a total number of 
plants and trees of ^.^S.Si^.jjS are reported, of which less than one-sixth are 
fruit trees ; about one-fourth of the number are grape-vines and small fruits, 
and the remainder are evergreen and deciduous trees, hardy shrubs, and roses. 
The increased taste in horticultural matters and the steadily increasing demand 
will cause the rapid growth of horticultural production. 

Within recent years the division of labor in every industry has made 
it possible to develop every branch in a measure independently of the 
others, save only so far as there must exist a mutual interdependence between 
all industries. In the day of small beginnings the farmer saved his own 



FRUIT-CULTURE. 483 

seeds for successive plantings, and if he wished to vary his crops or add 
to his varieties, he made an exchange with his neighbors. Since the 
demand for seeds of all agricultural products, fruits, vegetables, and flowers, 
lias made it profitable to raise seeds for commercial purposes, it has been 
found worth while to devote 169,831 acres of land exclusively to seed 
production. Nearly one-half of the 569 seed farmers are in the North 
Atlantic States, covering 47,813 acres, or ah average of 185 acres per 
farm. In the North Central division there are 157 farms, with a total acre- 
age of 787,096, or 555 acres per farm. The largest farms are reported in 
Nebraska and Iowa, with an average of 695 acres. Several of these farms 
average 3000 acres each. The industry is not a new one, for two seed 
farms were reported before 1800. 

Commercial floriculture has made the greater part of its development 
within the past ten years, and there are in this country to-day 965 state and 
local floral societies and clubs, besides the Society of American Florists. 
It is probably due to the influence of these societies that there is a rapidly 
growing taste for the culture of flowers. More than in any other American 
industry are opportunities offered for women. Of the 4659 floral establish- 
ments reported in the census year, 312 were owned and conducted by 
women. These establishments are valued at $38,355,722.43, and the 
combined wages of the 16,847 men and 1958 women employed, amount 
to $8,500,000. The rose is the universally favorite flower, as shown by the 
report of products. Nearly fifty million roses were produced in the year, 
thirty-nine million hardy plants and shrubs, and 153,000,000 of all other 
plants. It may be of interest to note that the greatest area of glass in any 
one floral establishment was 150,000 square feet, and the smallest 60 square 
feet, an attachment to a New England farm-house where the woman of 
the house sells from $35 to $50 worth of plants and cut flowers each year. 
Every state and territory except Idaho, Nevada, Indian Territory, and 
Oklahoma, reported floral establishments. 

No industry is more fascinating and compensating to the man who has 
an instinctive fondness for nature, than fruit culture. Aside from tin- 
pleasure of watching the growth in his orchards and on his plantations, from 
shoot to bud and bloom, through the whole ripening process to full fruitage he 
is rewarded even further by the literal fruits of conscientious toil. But perhaps 
no agricultural product is more subject to the uncertainty of varying seasons. 

Although extensive fruit farming is of comparatively recent date in 
America, statistics show that $85,000,000 was expended in the home markets 
during the last census year for orchard products. In addition, fully $20,000,000 
was spent for imported fruits and nuts. There is every reason to believe 
that in a few years, with the certain development of our country's resources. 



4§4 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



and with our rapidly increasing fruit industry, we shall be able to supply, 
not only the domestic markets, but a large part of the foreign as well. 

Fruit raising as a vocation was hardly known in the South until after 
the Civil War. It would have been beneath the dignity of the "fine old 
Southern gentleman" to part with his orchard delicacies for money. The 
besl his land could produce belonged always to his family, his friends, and 
the chance stranger within his gates. But when the civil strife was over, 
and his occupation gone, the gentleman turned to the products of the rich 
soil for his livelihood. To-day we find much of our best and most abundant 
fruit is grown in the South, much ol which is raised for early Northern markets. 




T I'll AVI \1 111 R. 



Fruit growers remember the wave of fruit culture which, beginning in 
Delaware, swept southward through Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and 
.ill the St. lies warmed by the Gulf Stream. The territorial limit has not yet 
keen reached. The west, aside from California, has not yet disclosed all 
its resources to the fruit grower. 

The apple seems to be peculiarly an American fruit, for it can be grown 
successfully in a variety of soils, and in nearly every part of the country. 
It probably thrives best in the hard, rocky land of New England, and there 
seems to be justice in that, for there is so much in the way of fruit cultivation 
that is denied the Xew Englander. It is often believed that the apple was 
the first fruit discovered in America ; but the fox-grape was found here by 



PEACHES, PEARS, ORANGES. 485 

the earliest explorers, and the apple was probably first introduced by the 
French missionaries. The Dutch and English colonists followed with varieties 
from their own countries. One branch of apple growing is strangely 
neglected, that of rearing and sending to market the early summer varieties. 

For the propagation of the peach, which is believed to have been brought 
here by Spanish explorers, we are indebted to the Indians. The variety 
known as "Indian" peach, sometimes also called Columbia, which was 
introduced into Jersey, has, by cross-cultivation, given numberless varieties, 
from the white free-stone to the peculiar dark purple type. The list of 
hardy varieties is not a long one, the latest being known as the "Excelsior." 
A slight difference in the quality of the fruit makes considerable difference 
in the price, ami the shrewd grower aims to produce a superior quality 
rather than a great yield. The process of thinning is strongly recommended. 
As soon as the blossoms have set, fully two-thirds are plucked, and another 
thinning should follow as soon as the color of the- fruit begins to turn. The 
result, other things being equal, is a yield of magnificent specimens, large, 
finely marked, and delicious to the taste. Peach cultivation is a remunerative 
industry in more ways than one. There is always a demand for skilled 
labor in the picking and handling of the fruit, this work being regarded as 
an art in its way. 

The process of thinning is also profitable with early apples and choice 
pears, especially with those growing in clusters. While California produces 
more pears than any other State, and the California pear has no rival in 
the regard in which it is popularly held, the Southern States, particularly 
Texas, are experimenting with the fruit and have already produced tine 
varieties. The objection to planting pear-trees commonly made, that one 
must wait so long for any returns, is met by the fact that the demand 
tor tine pears, as for all high-class native fruit, is constantly increasing. 
A large capital is not necessary to insure success in this branch of the 
fruit industry. The grower needs only to avail himself of the experiences 
of others in regard to the best soil, best methods of producing, and best 
varieties for cultivation. 

The orange industry is a recent one. The fruit was first raised in this 
country for market by Dr. Clayton Cargill, of Dover, Del., in 1865. Soon 
after this Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, visiting the region of the St. fohn's 
River, in Florida, wrote glowing letters on the possibilities for orange cul- 
ture. Since then the trackless pine woods have been converted into orange 
bowers, beautiful to look upon, delightful to the senses, and profitable to 
the owner. There are $10,000,000 invested in orange groves in Florida, 
with a yearly return of $2,000,000. Fifty varieties are yielded by the tall, 
graceful, shining-leaved trees in that State alone, and fully 10,000 square 



486 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



miles are adapted to the production of the bridal blossom. The finest 
oranges in the world come from Florida, and are raised on the banks of 
the Indian River. No apologies are needed for that fruit, and there are 

no vain re- 
's grets that 
such an d 
such a qual- 
ity is miss- 
ing. The 
Gulf Stream 
weathers are 
favorable to 
a variety that 
is almost as 
large as a 
croquet ball, 
of a deep 
color, brown 
cheeked, thin 
skinned, 
plentifully 
: md flavored to a 
nicety. It is difficult to be- 
ieve that the orange is not a 
native product of American soil, so 
splendidly does it nurture this 
truit. It is only a few hundred 
years that the orange has been 
known on this continent, and we 
^ are indebted to Spanish cavaliers for its 
introduction. Its home is supposed to be 
Southeastern Asia. 

California produces a superior quality of 
some perhaps equal to the " Indian 
ivers." Charles Dudley Warner writes that 
he could not find an excellent quality 
of oranges in California, but now quantities of delicious 
native fruits are easily obtainable. The question is often asked if it is feasible 
for one to attempt orange culture in California with small capital ? In all 
probability twenty times the number of men who are interested in the busi- 
ness now could become wealthy if engaged in intelligent culture of the fruit. 




BANANAS, PINEAPPLES. 487 

Energy, pluck, patience, and faith in his Maker, are pronounced good qualities 
in a man who starts out to make his fortune in any branch of fruit raising. 

Grape fruit is produced in Florida and the other Southern Stales, as is also 
the shaddock, a coarse, pumpkin-shaped fruit of the same variety, weighing 
from three to five pounds. The persimmon, lime, fig, prune, guava, pineapple, 
banana, etc., are cultivated in the same region. In the cultivation of the banana 
the utmost care must be taken in selecting the best soil for the tree. The 
average time required to bring it to fruition is about one year, but if planted 
in one locality it may mature in nine months, while in another, where there is, ap- 
parently, only a slight difference in the soil, from fifteen to sixteen months may 
be required. The shoots are set fifteen feet apart, thus giving the growing tree 
plenty of room to spread its broad, translucent leaves, under whose shelter is 
partially hidden the single bunch of fruit which it is its mission to bear. Having 
performed its duty, the tree proper dies, while fresh shoots come forth to produce 
in time more food for the sustenance of its master, man. People remote from 
the home of the banana are not grateful enough for this palatable, nourishing 
fruit. They nibble it simply as the relish or finishing touch of a meal, unconscious 
of the fact that it forms almost the whole subsistence of millions of natives of the 
Tropics. It is claimed that a banana contains as much nourishment as a pound 
of beef-steak, but the Northerner clings to the beef at twenty-five cents a pound 
in preference to the humble banana at " two for five. " The banana harvest 
does not depend upon the time of year, but upon the time of planting. We have 
a continual banana season, although the best market is between the first of 
March and the last of June. The large bunches, often weighing sixty pounds, 
are cut while green by machinery, and are caught by the laborer, as they 
fall, without breaking or bruising a single fruit. The bunches for- transporta- 
tion are wrapped in the dead leaves of the plant, which are used wet to 
insure pliability. The growth of the banana industry in this country is almost 
marvelous. Each of the large cities, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, 
receives from seventeen to thirty thousand bunches a day. As in other 
branches of fruit-raising, the supply does not equal the demand. We pay 
Jamaica alone $1,000,000 a year for bananas, and the possibilities in the way 
of cultivation of this fruit should be a stimulus to encourage the industry. 
There are many " banana walks " along the irrigation canals in our Southern 
States, and there is. room for many more. The enterprising young man 
with a few hundred dollars will find rich returns for intelligent investment 
in banana fields. 

Pineapple culture in this country is still in its infancy. The largest planta- 
tion in Florida is owned by Thomas P2. Richards, the pioneer in the industry, 
who began to plant in 1879. It is not yet known how much of our land is 
adapted to the pineapple, nor are the best methods of culture yet determined. 



488 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Much can be learned from the pioneer growers, who have already achieved 
encouraging results, but the pineapple planter is still an experimenter. The 
number of crops that a plant can profitably yield is a disputed question. 
Reports show that three crops are the limit under certain conditions of culture, 
four crops can be grown under other conditions, while one grower maintains 
that five crops can be easily yielded before the plants need to be replaced. A 
larger capital for investment — not less than $3000 or $4000 — will be required 




VALLEY IRRIGATION IN SOUTHERN 



to yield satisfactory returns in this branch of fruit culture, than in any other. 
While the experiment may be regarded as more or less hazardous, the returns 
are often gratifying. In some cases $700 an acre, with a net of $300, was 
reported, and the results are quick. The orange requires seven or eight years 
to reach fruition, and the pineapple plant bears a full crop in a year and a half 
from the time of setting. This delicious fruit, whether canned or fresh, will 
always be the piece de resistance of every thrifty housewife, and until its culture 



GRAPES. 489 

becomes a flourishing American industry she must continue to pay from twenty- 
five to seventy-five cents apiece for these luxurious necessities. 

Of the progress made in the cultivation of the smaller garden fruits com- 
paratively little has been written. They have been overshadowed by the larger 
enterprises devoted to the culture of larger fruits, and it has been said of them 
that except to the enthusiast they are, like Heaven, "objects of special interest 
and general neglect." 

Our greatest fruit industry is grape culture. It is strange that no foreign 
grapes have yet been raised east of the Rocky Mountains. The experimenter 
has tried again and again to propagate European varieties, but all his efforts 
have been unsuccessful except in California. A few years ago E. W. Bull 
began experimenting with the wild fox-grape, and his efforts have met with 
gratifying success. The Ives Seedling, Lady Woodruff, and the luscious Concord 
are direct descendants of the humble " Fox." The Delaware, Isabella, and 
Catawba are accidental varieties. 

The American wild grape and its cultivated varieties are peculiarly adapted 
for wine making, and it is encouraging to learn that France, which produces 
finer table grapes than any other country, is experimenting with our grapes for 
wine purposes. It is probable that the United States will eventually supply the 
world with the best vineyard varieties. Less than half a century ago a venture- 
some grower of grapes in the Lake Keuka district, N. Y., sent to New York 
city his full crop, consisting of fifty pounds. To his surprise, the entire ship- 
ment was sold. Growing reckless with his success, he sent during the following 
year about 250 pounds, and broke the market! In 1891 about 20,000 tons 
were consumed through the markets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 
During the same year California alone manufactured 16,500,000 gallons of wine, 
besides producing 235,526 pounds of table grapes, and preparing 2,197,463 
boxes of raisins, with prospects of increasing the yield of raisins within the 
next five years to 10,000,000 boxes. In the vineyards alone 100,422 men were 
employed, and the importance of the industry can scarcely be estimated. 

Raisin making is a comparatively simple process. On the fruit ranches in 
California the grapes are simply cut from the stem and left on the ground for 
the sun to dry. 

Statistics show that New York State produced 60,687 pounds of grapes for 
table use during the year and made 2,528,250 gallons of wine, employing 
25,500 men for the work. However, the figures do not indicate that the con- 
sumption of wine has increased alarmingly, but that the wine consumer has 
transferred his patronage to home-made yoods. It may be of interest here to 
note that the largest wine cask in the work! is in the Lake Erie district. It is 
made of Ohio oak and holds 36,000 gallons. California can boast of the largest 
as well as of the smallest vineyard in the world. The former is at Tehama and 



49° THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

contains 3800 acres, to which 1000 acres are to be added within a year. The 
smallest vineyard is in Santa Barbara county, and consists of a single vine 
which was planted by a Mexican woman about sixty-nine years ago. Its trunk 
has a diameter of twelve inches, its branches extend over an area of 12,000 
feet, and it produces annually from 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of grapes, of the 
famous Mission variety, the bunches frequently weighing six or seven pounds 
each. The old lady to whose thrift the present owners are indebted died in 
1865, at the age of 107. 

The total number of acres included in the vineyards of the various States 
and Territories is 307,575, giving employment to 200,780 laborers. The aver- 
age number employed in the outdoor work, in the cultivating of the fruit, is 
one person to three acres. As growers become more familiar with the use of 
spraying apparatus and fungicides, the harvests will be more certain. It may 
be a long time before we shall achieve a parallel to the grapes of Eshcol, 
though our own product guarantees great possibilities in viticulture. 

Aside from the small fruit farms, and hot-houses for the cultivation of black- 
berries, raspberries, and strawberries, much of the small fruit for market comes 
from the woods and marshes, where they grow in a semi-wild state. Their yield 
as regards quantity and market price, is almost marvelous. 

In many New England localities, the small farms that once were the 
source of livelihood of the Yankee and his family have weather-stained boards 
across their front gates bearing the sign, "For Sale," or "To Let." The pear 
and apple orchards, clover meadows, and small fields, well enough- for the sedate 
fathers, are too small to bound the aspirations and energies of the younger 
generation. The soil which has borne harvests and fruitage for ten generations 
is not so responsive as the soil of the New West. The young men who do not 
turn their attention to the more lucrative trades and professions of the cities, 
venture into farming on a large scale in the West, where the indolent tiller reaps 
almost as rich harvests as the energetic one. The yielding capacity of the wheat 
farms of the New West is almost incredible. If the native grass is burned off 
or turned under, and seed is scattered on top of a light plowing, the tender 
grain springs up and yields good returns with but little effort on the part of the 
tiller. On the other hand, when great capital is invested, improved methods 
and machinery used, and efficient labor employed, wheat farming in these regions 
yields returns that would seem incredible to the old-fashioned farmer. The sup- 
ply of grain is limited only by the acreage under cultivation. From 1 2,000 to 
40,000 acres are comprised in single farms, and the number of buildings, grana- 
ries, elevators and windmills on each give the appearance at a short distance 
of little villages. Farming on such a scale is simply a business venture, con- 
trolled by monopolies or wealthy capitalists, who leave the entire charge of the 
business with superintendents. About 150 men are employed during the harvest 



THE COTTON FIELDS OF THE SOUTH. 



491 



Gulf 
lines 



of .Mexico to the 
of the Carolinas, 



season, with daily wages averaging $1.50 per capita, and thousands of dollars 
are invested in machinery and horses. The small farmer in the West has no 
chance in his competition with monopolies, and while companies are becoming 
wealthy, the communities receive little of the benefit. There is no home-life on 
these large Western farms, and the only society is that of the laborers, often 
uneducated foreigners. 

The great fertile district extending from the 
Panhandle of Texas, from the curving boundary 
Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana 
to the Rio Grande River, has been called the 
Land of Cotton. The most beautiful, as 
well as the most typical plantations are those 
in the valleys of the Red and the Mississippi 
Rivers, where the soil is a rich red loam, 
easily cultivated as well as productive and 
responsive. The climate is mild and salubri- 
ous, and all natural conditions are favorable 
to the cultivation of the cotton. In all its 
different stages of growth it is the most 
interesting of those plants that fall under 
the class commonly designated as "useful." 
Its very seed is a mystery of the life 
principle, for that small, woolly, rusty little 
cocoon conceals the warp and woof of the 
great proportion of humanity's covering. 
After lying all winter in the neglected 
heaps about the old gins and barns, the 
seed are tossed into the moist earth, and 
soon the three-leaved plants appear, run- 
ning in long straight rows for miles across 
the fields of bottom-land. The blossom, 
appearing as a pink bud, becomes white 

petaled, filling the land with a rare fragrance. All the while the process of 
cultivation goes on, the dark-faced laborers plowing, thinning, hoeing, and 
weeding. It is a leisurely work which suits the indolent nature of the negro, 
the ordained cultivator of cotton. 

During the summer drouth, the green stalks turn brown, and the leaves 
fall away, giving place to the cooped boll with its contents of snow. Soon 
these bolls burst, and out comes the fine dry fabric. " Cotton-pickin' time" 
begins, the merriest, jolliest, "flushest" season the darkies ever know. With 
good-natured hardihood they desert their town homes, for it doesn't pay to 




WIND-BREAK OB 

EUl U.YI'l I S 1 1; I I -., 1 
PROTECT ORCHARDS. 



49 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

tend horses, run errands, nurse and cook, while the vast fields of cotton 
stretching beyond invite their nimble fingers, and promise pay for actual 
number of pounds picked. 

Some of these plantations are small colonies in themselves. Their bound- 
aries include many miles squaie of prairie and timber lands. Upon each is the 
store for general merchandise, a post-office, church, and school house, besides 
the mill, gin, press, compress, and warehouses. There are the renters' houses, 
the "hands' " cabins, each with its truck patch and pig pen, the owner's house, 
with its long, rose-bowered verandas, its beautiful lawns and flower gardens, the 
stables, barns, and carriage houses. There are an ice-house, a dairy, an apple- 
house and smoke house, and buildings innumerable. Fruit orchards and vine- 
yards, hammocks and rustic seats, all contribute to make the life of the 
Southerners as enviable as possible. About these old plantations lingers the 
atmosphere of ante-bellum grandee life. Things are done on a large scale. 
Supplies are laid in by the barrel and hogshead, and produce is planted and 
garnered accordingly. Vet everything is subservient to King Cotton, who fills 
the measure of the hearts and expectations of his subjects. Year after year, 
and crop after crop, bring no great profits to the owner. He does not seem to 
take into consideration the difference between the former times, when he owned 
both labor and product, and the present conditions, with its divided interest, 
daily wages, inequality of labor, and decreasing capabilities, which have warped 
the conditions of the industry since the war. Paid labor is not equal in many 
ways to slave labor, for the slaves worked for the interest of their masters. As 
many as five hundred slaves often grew up together on one plantation. They 
knew but one home and one occupation. Their first toddling steps were 
between the rows of young cotton, and they learned to sing the cotton field 
songs as soon as they could talk. Their wants were few ; their knowledge of 
life and its possibilities was bounded by the blue rim of the horizon which set 
on their master's plantation. Now they are a set of shiftless nomads, wearying 
of the new broom of their spasmodic energies at one plantation, and moving 
on to a fitful spell of work at another. This in a great measure accounts for 
the uncertainties. Employer and employee have no longer a mutual interest. 
As tor white cotton-hands, they do not pay. The hot seasons are too intense 
for them and the returns too precarious. Yet the Southener clings to his cotton 
fields. He cannot believe that Egyptian and other foreign cottons are compet- 
ing successfully with his. He cannot understand why it is that he makes as 
many bales to the acre as he did in the old time yet clears no money. He 
only knows that if raised at all it must be raised in large quantities. The cost 
of labor is nearly equal to the returns of the crop. He hauls his bales into 
town to be sampled and bid upon by merchants and buyers, and is satisfied if 
the net profits are sufficient to pay off last year's store-bills. The system of 



THE COTTON FIELDS OF THE SOUTH. 493 

monthly and yearly credit is, of itself, the ruin of the Southern farmer. He is 
even handicapped by his tenants. He must advance them provisions while they 
are working in his employ. If his crop runs short he is in debt to his merchants 
and his tenants are in debt to him. He has not a diversity of crops to fall back 
upon in an unfavorable year. So all depends upon the season, upon the drouth, 
or overflow, or boll-worm. 

Yel the business possesses a peculiar fascination. There' are the reen 
fields in the spring-time ; the blossom fields in the summer ; the brown fields of 
early autumn ; and the snow fields of harvest-time. There are the pickers in 
wagon loads and tramping crowds, weary and care-free. They sing all day as 
they fill their baskets, joking and depreciating each other's skill as they wait 
about the weigher's stand at night for their weights and paw and singing again 
to tin- merry tinkle of the banjo, as they lounge about their cabin doors before 
bedtime. There are the gins with their creaking machinery and snow-drifting 
lint room ; presses witli the ties and bagging, rolling out great bales, which are- 
crowded into a sixth ot their original size by the mighty elbows of the corn- 
Then there are the wagons, loaded bale upon bale, jogging along the 
road, the happy tenant driving, wife and children perched upon the 1 
" goin' to trade." There are visions of cotton exchanges, where gambling in 
futures runs high, and millions change hands every day ; of huge vessels at the 
rt and long freight cars in the inland, laden and groaning with the pre- 
cious freight 

( >ne of the devices of greatest interest to the visitor in many parts of the 
West is the device which makes man a special providence in sections which were 
formerly arid wastes because of lack of rain. In an admirable discussion of 
the subject of irrigation. General Irwin quotes the phrase " irrigation makes 
homes for millions, better than the rain makes homes." In former times irriga- 
tion would undoubtedly have been regarded as a device of Satan, since it 
attempts to supplement the work of Providence in making the earth fruitful. 
The change in twenty years by the introduction of water into sections where no 
water was has been marvelous, but it is only prophetic of the still greater 
changes to come. It is not many years since the maps of the Western country 
were interspersed with forbidding dots, marked deserts, which were universally 
regarded as waste places forever. In the map of the near future there will be 
no American desert. Irrigation will have made almost every acre of land 
available, and those sections which seem to-day almost beyond redemption by 
artificial fertilization, will undoubtedly yield to the increasinL; inventiveness and 
ingenuity of man. 

The arid area in this country, according to Major Powell, is fifteen hundred 
miles in its widest part, from east to west, and a thousand miles from north to 
south, containing over a million of square miles, over six hundred millions of 
acres, and constituting about one-third the entire area of the country. These 



494 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

statements make the importance of irrigation evident at the first glance. 
Within the limits of this natural desert lie Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, 
New Mexico, Idaho, and parts of Montana, of the Dakotas, of Texas, of Kansas, 
of Nebraska, of Washington, of Oregon, and of California. The Secretary of the 
Interior, in his report for 1891, declared " that 120,000,000 acres that are now 
desert may be redeemed by irrigation so as to produce the cereals, fruits, and 
garden products possible in the climate where the lands are located." It is to 
the Mormons that we owe the first practical and successful use of irrigation on 
a large scale ; a scale so large and so impressive that it became a great object- 
lesson in the whole West. There are now under the influence of irrigation 
nearly four million acres of land, penetrated by more than fifteen thousand miles 
of artificial water-ways in the form of canals and ditches. The condition of the 
cultivator of irrigated lands is, in one important respect, more assured than that 
of the cultivator of lands within the rain belt, for while rains fail, and droughts 
are of frequent occurrence, to the disaster and discouragement of the cultivator, 
irrigation is unfailing. 

In California, the price of water is regulated by law, and it is likely that 
the other States and territories in which irrigation is used will, sooner or later, 
regulate the matter just as other States regulate and control the freight 
charges of the railroads. The greatest need in irrigated countries is the 
building of large reservoirs for water storage, for the purpose of securing an 
equalization of distribution. The dry regions contain hills and valleys, and the 
soil which is furnished by the valley is supplied with water by the mountains, 
and all that is needed is the utilization and equalization of the supply which 
nature furnishes. The main question now is how shall this be done. The 
Secretary of the Interior, in the report already quoted from, says that private 
corporations and associations are now substantially given the field of water 
supply for that domain which may be redeemed by irrigation, and that this field 
is being rapidly seized upon. The United States does not retain control, but 
establishes States or Territories, by which the control is handed over to corpora- 
tions. In the Secretary's opinion the General Government should not release 
altogether its hold upon water supplies. Xo one can compute the future popu- 
lousness and value of the arid Territory, and no one can compute, therefore, the 
future value of privileges which are now being given away. It will not belong 
before the matter of water supply will be one of the highest national import- 
ance, both as regards the value of the control to the Government and its 
importance to settlers who are dependent upon it. In a recent message to 
Congress, the President said "the Government should not part with its 
ownership of the water sources, except on the condition of insuring water to 
settlers at reasonable rates." The appliances of irrigation add not a little to 
the picturesqueness of the country, and the wind-mills often may be made as 
effective as the mills of' Holland, if proportion and color are taken into account. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 



SOME GREAT AMERICAN INDUSTRIES. 




\" \Jfa£t ARBLE is, of all stones used lor building or sculpture, tin- best 
known and the most anciently used. The earliest records oi 
human architecture tell of its employment. The Egyptians 
used it before: they built the Pyramids. The temples and 
palaces of Greece were built oi it ; and it. was the boast oi an 
Emperor that he had found Rome brick and had left it marble. 
For external structure and for internal decorations marble was 
used with equal felicity, while for statuary and all forms oi 
sculpture it was the only stone held worthy of the artist's chisel. From Mount 
Pentelicus and from the Isle of Paros came the snowy stone of which the Par 
thenon and its fellow ^ems of architecture were built, and in which were 
wrought the masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles, while the artists oi Rome 
sought their supplies at Carrara, on the Gulf of Spezzia. 

It is a far cry from Mount Pentelicus to Otter Creek. Yet the lame of 
tin- former for this beautiful stone is rapidly being transferred to the latter. 
The hills that border that humble stream in Central Vermont are green without, 
as their name implies. But within they have been found to have hearts of 
snowy marble, rivaling that of Italy and Greece in -purity and texture, A 
considerable quantity of it is perfectly suited to the finest statuary work, while 
the amount available lor architectural purposes is practically inexhaustible. 

This Rutland County marble, for which Vermont is famous, is oi the- age 
ol the Trenton limestone of New York, and forms a huge layer, 2000 feel 
thick, underlying hundreds of square miles of country. Not all portions of the 

layer, however, are valuable. Where it crops out at the surface of the gr 'I, 

or nearly reaches it, the upper part, for a depth of from ten to fifty feet, is 
worthless, because of the action of the weather. At West Rutland the vein ol 
perfectly pure statuary marble, rivaling that of Paros and Carrara, is only four 
feet thick. Put there are fifty feet more of superb clouded and colored marble 
for architectural use. At Sutherland Fails the vein of building marble is 
seventy-five feet thick, and at Pittsford it is more than six hundred feet thick, 
with scarcely a seam or a flaw. Other less valuable deposits of marble, while, 

495 



496 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



clouded, or colored, are found at Lee, Mass., Tuckahoe and Sing Sing, N. Y., 
Louisa County, Va., and other places in the Appalachian Mountain belt. At 
Shoreham, Vt., and Glen's Falls, N. Y., black marble is found. Burlington, 

Vt., furnishes the beauti- 
ful variegated " Winoo- 
ski " marble. But the 
mountains of Tennessee 
are the chief source of 
this last-named kind, 
yielding seemingly end- 
less quantities of fine- 
textured stone, colored 
in every imaginable hue 
and tint, and veined and 
streaked and mottled in 
the most bewilderingly 
beautiful manner. 

So it came to pass 
that when the hardy 
I ireen Mountain farmer 
fi >und his fields becoming 
sterile and unprofitable, 
he looked below the sur- 
face, and there found a 
richer and surer harvest 
than ever had appeared 
above. And while on 
the Gulf of Spezzia the 
quarrymen clung to the 
primitive methods of 
work, slow, laborious, 
and wasteful, the New 
Englanders utilized in 
quarrying the latest 
devices of Yankee 
ingenuity. 

,,l Marble Quarry in Vermont) The first thing tO do 

is to clear away the sur- 
face rock, which heat and cold and other conditions have partially decomposed 
and rendered worthless. This is largely done by blasting, great care being 
exercised to use light charges, acting upward, so as not to injure the sound 




•:< 




( - 



HOW TO GET THE STONES OUT. 



497 



marble below. After this "cap-rock" is thus removed and a "sound" floor 
secured there is no more blasting - . The stone is too valuable to be shattered 
into useless fragments. 

Instead of gunpowder, steam-power is used. There are two kinds of 
"channeling machines" in use. One drives a set of chisels, the other a 
series of drills. Both eftect the same purpose, the cutting of straight, narrow, 
parallel channels in the 
marble floor, five or six 
feet deep and perhaps 
the same distance apart. 
Other channels are then 
cut at right angles to 
the first, dividing the 
floor into squares. One 
of these huge blocks is 
next broken loose, by 
means of wedges, and 
lifted out. Into the 
cavity thus formed a 
workman gets down, 
and directs a drill or set 
of chisels horizontally 
against the bases of the 
other blocks, which are 
thus one by one cut 
off — "gadding," the 
work is called — and 
lifted out. When all 
are removed, a fresh 
"floor" is presented 
and the "channeling 
machines " are set at 
work again, cutting 
their deep, narrow tren- 
ches and dividing the "floor" into another series of blocks. The cost of thus 
cutting marble and raising it from the quarry is from seventy-five cents to a 
dollar the cubic foot. 

These huge cubes of marble are taken from the quarry to the mill, to 

be cut into smaller blocks or slabs for building purposes. The cutting is 

'done by means of gangs of horizontal saws,* made of soft iron and having 

no teeth, but being fed with sand and water. They an- operated by steam 




S] UN E-G \ I I 



498 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



% 



VI 



or water-power. The polishing- of the blocks and slabs is also clone by power. 

The pieces of marble are placed in a "rubbing-bed" and ground and 

polished with sand and emery by a rubber, which works on them with either 

a rotary or a to-and-fro motion. 

Pieces of marble of extraordinary size, for monolithic columns, obelisks, 

etc., are cut and fashioned in the same 
way. Much of the fluting and other 
carving on ornamental stonework is done 
by machinery in the mills. Sometimes 
hand -carving is done there also, and 
sometimes it is left until the stones are 
actually in place in the structure of 
which they are to form a part. 

The American marble industry is a 
comparatively young one. It began about 
1836, with the burning of some of the 



M 1 




surface marble, at West 

Rutland, for lime. Then a 

few tombstones were cut. 

After a dozen years systematic 

quarrying was begun ; but it 

was difficult to persuade the 

public that Vermont marble was 

as good as that imported from Europe. That it is as good, if not better, is, 

however, now amply established, and the quarrying of it has become a mammoth 

industry. \\ here once were barren sheep-pastures, worth a few dollars an acre. 

are now vast and increasing caverns, with snowy walls, from which busy toilers 



HARREL-HOIST AND TUNNEL THROUGH II 



SHBURN MILL. 



OLD- TIME MIL L ING. 



499 



armed with steel and steam have taken millions of dollars worth of stone, 
enough of it, and good enough, to have built all Athens in the age of Pericles. 

"The old order changeth, giving place to new." But only the means 
are new, and not the ends. Before history began, bread was the staff of life, 
and in the Stone Age the grain of the field was ground into meal for food. 
Among the earliest im- 
plements of human in- 
genuity were the two 
stones between which 
the corns of wheat or 
barley were crushed, 
and those very imple- 
ments are in use to-day 
in savage lands. Civili- 
zation still clings to 
bread as the staff of 
life, and still grinds 
the grain between two 
stones. They are large 
stones, now, and they 
are operated by steam 
or water power. But 
the result is the same 
in kind as it was un- 
counted ages ago. 

The well-nigh uni- 
versal method of grind- 
ing grain is that of the 
common village mill. 
Two huge disc-shaped 
stones are placed one 
above the other, the 
faces which come to- 
gether being grooved 
in a peculiar fashion. 

Through the upper stone there is a hole, through which the grain trickles from 
a hopper and enters the narrow space between the stones. Then, as the 
upper stone whirls swiftly round and round upon its axis, the grain is finely 
ground, thereafter to be screened, so as to separate the fine flour from the 
coarser bran. To this day, with few exceptions, that is the process used 
in flour mills, «reat and small. 




SHOOTING A WEI I.. 



500 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



About 1870, however, some millers in Hungary began experimenting 
with a view of improving the milling process, and the result was the YValz 
Muhl, or cylinder-mill, called also the gradual reduction mill, and, in this 
country, the "new process." In this system no millstones are used, but, 
in their stead, many pairs of small, horizontal steel rollers, their surfaces 
traversed by small, sharp grooves, sometimes spiral, sometimes parallel 

with the axes. These pairs of 
rollers are arranged in sets of at 
least three, one above the other, 
with a space between. The grain 
passes between the uppermost pair 
and is crushed. Falling through 
the intervening space it is cooled, 
and then goes between the second 
pair and is crushed more finely. 
Again it is cooled by falling to the 
third set, and again is crushed 
more finely still. The finest grades 
of flour are thus passed through 
eighteen or twenty sets of rollers. 

This is the " new process " 
used in the great mills of Minne- 
sota, perhaps the most important 
scat of the flour-making industry 
in the world. Here the famous and 
picturesque Falls of St. Anthony, 
on the Mississippi River, furnish 
practically unlimited water-power, 
through systems of turbine wheels. 
Anthony Trollope — not the An- 
thony for whom the falls were 
named — once said that he never 
guarding a wild cm well. could believe, until he actually saw 

it, that there was a place, inhabited 
by rational men, called Minneapolis. The name is a queer mixture of Indian 
and Greek. But never mind. Philology may stand aghast, but all the same 
a very great share of the world must get its bread from this same Minneapolis. 
Here huge mills form a city in themselves. For their supply cartage would 
be absurd ; the railroads run directly into them. Daily long trains bear in 
the harvest of the wheat fields and bear out the finished flour, the finest in 
the world. There is no tumult or clatter; the thousands of cylinders are 




IMPROVED METHODS AND VAST OUTPUT. 



501 



whirling with only a low, continuous hum. There is no dust in the air, with 
its death-dealing power. Once mills were pervaded with a fine, impalpable 
dust. This one day exploded, with the force of gunpowder, wrecking one of 
the largest mills and. destroying many lives. Since then elaborate systems of 
air-currents have been devised, keeping the atmosphere of the mills always free 
from dust, and cool. 

Thousands of barrels of flour daily are turned out of one of these mam- 
moth mills, and thousands of empty barrels must be daily received to contain 
the snowy product. With a task of such magnitude on hand, the old-fashioned 
cooper's shop is use- 
less. Great factories 
have taken its place, 
where saws and 
k n i v e s, d r iven by 
steam power, in whole- 
sale fashion transform 
forests into flour bar- 
rels. These go in 
towering loads to the 
mills, and are hurried 
in the grasp of an end- 
less chain to where the 
perfected flour is pour- 
ing from the whirring 
rollers and through 
the quivering silken 
screens. 

Starting from bins 
in the upper story, the 
wheat travels through 
the vast building, from 
floor to floor, from side 

to side, untouched by human hands ; now being cleansed from impurities, now 
being crushed finer and finer, now being sifted again and again ; until at 
last, encased in barrels of one hundred and ninety-six pounds each, it issues 
forth by the carload to feed the millions of the world. Half a billion bushels, 
or thirty billion pounds, are the inconceivable figures that represent the 
annual wheat crop of America ; and the mills of Minneapolis and Rochester 
and other cities are worthy, in magnitude and perfection of equipment, to deal 
with the large share of it that forms their grist. True, they are doing, in kind, 
only what the squalid wild woman of the cave-dwelling race did with stone 




502 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

bowl and grinder. But in degree, how different ! And though the end be the 
same, in means how has the old order changed and given place to the new ! 

The use of petroleum in various forms is of unremembered origin. 
Nineveh and Babylon knew it well, the "slime" of the Old Testament being 
merely crude petroleum, partially evaporated. To this day the oil wells of 
Is, on the Euphrates, which supplied "slime" or mortar for the building of 
Babylon, are still flowing. Other ancient wells are in the Ionian Islands ; at 
Amiano, Italy ; on the Persian Shore of the Caspian Sea, and in Burmah. 
Pliny tells of the use of this oil in lamps in his day, and the city of Genoa 
was largely lighted with it centuries ago. But it did not play a great part in 
the world's economy until an American "struck oil" in the latter half of the 
present century. 

As early as 1819 petroleum was collected from wells in Ohio and put 
to various uses. In 1850 the manufacture of the oil from coal was begun, 
and rapidly increased until it became an important industry. But not yet 
was the true vein struck. The honor of at last doing this was reserved for 
Colonel G. L. Drake, who, in 1858, began to bore, on Oil Creek, Venango 
County, Pa., an artesian well. "What for?" his neighbors asked. "For 
oil," was his reply; and they laughed him to scorn. But on August 28. 1859, 
at a depth of 71 feet, he "struck oil." It flowed at the rate of 400 gallons 
a day, and he sold it for 55 cents a gallon ; and his neighbors stopped laughing. 

Seldom has the world seen such a rush for wealth as the oil country then 
beheld. Wells were sunk everywhere. A forest of derricks arose. Farms that 
had been worth five dollars were largely purchased at a thousand dollars an 
acre. One farmer sold out for a round million. Another would not sell, but 
got $3000 a day in royalties on wells sunk on his farm. Fabulous fortunes 
were amassed. One well, the Noble, in a little more than a year, yielded 
500,000 barrels without pumping. The principal oil field was in Pennsyl- 
vania, but many wells were sunk in adjacent counties of New York and in 
Ohio and West Virginia. 

In time the freely flowing wells began to fail and pumping had to be re- 
sorted to, under which process the yield was maintained, though the profits were 
slightly lessened. Another system of renewing the flow of exhausted wells was 
invented some years ago and is widely and successfully practiced. This is 
called " shooting," or " torpedoing." A gallon or so of nitro-glycerine, enclosed 
in a long and slender tin can, is lowered to the bottom of the well and exploded. 
The shock shatters the oil-bearing slate and sandstone for a considerable dis- 
tance around the bore, and jars it much further, and the result is an immediate 
rush of oil, often spurting high in air, like a geyser. This process is patented, 
and tlie work is done by a single company, whose agents drive about the oil 
country, over rough roads, in a most reckless fashion, with cans of nitro-gly- 



THE GREAT PETROLEUM PIPE LINES. 503 

cerine under the wagon-seat. Now and then a jolt of the wagon causes an 
explosion. There is a tremendous noise and a hole in the ground ; that is all. 
Man, horse, and wagon are literally blown to atoms. "Moonlighting" is the 
name applied to the surreptitious " shooting " of wells by unauthorized persons 
— owners of wells who thus evade paying royalty to the company holding the 
patent. 

" Wild-cat" wells, so called, are shafts sunk secretly, or so guarded that 
none but the owners can approach them to ascertain their value. Such wells 
are surrounded by armed sentries, who promptly repel curious .visitors at 
the rifle's muzzle. If the well proves profitable the owners arc able thus 




TRANSPORTING nil. FROM Fill-: PIPE-LINES TO THE 
CARS. 



to secure other territory around it 

•""" before the price is enhanced by the 

knowledge that they have " struck 

The crude nil is stored in huge 
tanks, and then shipped to the refi- 
neries, at New York and elsewhere. 
( )nce it was all conveyed in casks. 
Then huge iron tanks, resembling a 
locomotive boiler in size and shape, were made, each being mounted on a flat 
railroad car and holding about 25,000 gallons. This method of transportation 
is still much used. In 1865, however, another plan was devised, which is now 
the characteristic method. This is the pumping of the oil through pipes, laid 
on or under the ground. These pipes are from tour to six inches in diameter, 
and on the long lines have pumping stations at intervals of aboj.it twenty-five 
miles. Twenty thousand barrels of oil may be sent daily through a six-inch 
pipe. The oil country is fairly gridironed with these pipe-lines ; and there are 
two lines reaching from Olean to New York Bay, 300 miles, and many others 
from fifty to 175 miles long. 



5o 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

In late years natural gas has become an important product of the oil fields. 
Exhausted oil wells often furnish it, and so do wells driven for the purpose. 
The gas rushes from the well in a powerful current, and when ignited forms a 
perpetual torch perhaps a hundred feet high, a very "pillar of fire. " This gas 
is conveyed through pipes to towns and cities, where it is used in place of the 
manufactured gas for illuminating purposes. It is also much used for fuel in 
private houses and in manufacturing establishments. It is found to be cheaper 
than coal, its fires more easily regulated, and the unpleasant features of smoke, 
cinders, and ashes are entirely avoided. 

Although the day of phenomenal "gushers" among oil wells seems well- 
nigh past, the industry maintains mammoth proportions. Thus in the month ot 
May. 1892, in the Pennsylvania field alone 183 new wells were sunk, 430! them 
being dry. The product of the new wells was 7795 barrels. In 1889 the oil 
fields of Pennsylvania and New York produced 21,486,403 barrels (of 42 gallons 
each, ) those of Ohio, 1 2,47 1,965, and those of West Virginia, Colorado, California, 
Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Kansas and Texas enough to bring the total for the 
United States up to 34,820,306 barrels. That produced in Ohio, Indiana, and 
California was used chiefly for fuel, and the rest for illuminating purposes, ex- 
cepting 109,891 barrels used for lubricating. The total value of the year's 
yield in its crude state was $26,554,652. The total product of the United 
States from 1S59 to 1X89, inclusive, was 407,985,503 barrels, or 17,135,391,126 
gallons of crude oil. 




CHAPTER XXVIII. 

GREAT INVENTIONS AND THEIR INVENTORS. 

ftjfe IVEN a country of magnificent proportions, overflowing with 
undeveloped natural resources, newly invaded by a people 
appreciating the advantages of wealth, educated above the 
average of the most favored nations, free to do right according 
to their own pleasure, active, ambitious, and protected in all 
righttul pursuits by a government of their own making, it is no 
miracle that the United States early exhibited a tendency to 
develop the elements of material well-being unprecedented in 
the history of the world ; nor that their subsequent progress should continue 
with accelerating speed and irresistible momentum. 

But our country has done more than simply develop itself — much more. 
The creative energy of its inventors has made the United States a new force in 
the world, changing and improving the conditions ot civilized life the world 
over, and enabling other peoples in other lands, whether the seats of ancient 
barbarism or of decadent civilization, to accomplish in a generation what had 
previously been possible only by the creeping progress of centuries. 

The Atlantic coast of North America was but a small part of the world first 
laid open to European influence' and occupation in the Columbian era. It was 
but a small part of the world invaded about that time by European colonists, and 
by no means the most promising ; nor was it the only new country colonized by 
the liberty-loving peoples of Northern Europe. It was pre-eminently favored, it 
is true, by an early attainment of civil and religious freedom, but it may well be 
doubted it those signal advantages by themselves would have or could have 
caused the social, industrial, ami material transformation of social lite character- 
istic of the United States. Freedom allows, but does not determine, radical 
changes in modes of living. Those are traceable rather to another influence, 
developed here as nowhere else — a singular appreciation and encouragement 
of new ideas, particularly those embodied in useful inventions. 

The idea ot recognizing, and to some extent protecting as property, 
intellectual creations, did not originate here, but it received here its earliest 
popular development under laws which made it easy for any inventor to secure 

505 



506 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

to himself for a term of years the absolute control of the useful fruits of his own 
creative energy. Our Patent Laws have been materially improved from time 
to time, and are still open to great improvements, yet they are, and always have 
been, in the main, the best in the world ; and, as a natural consequence, the list 
of American inventions exceeds in number — as they have surpassed in their 
influence in determining the trend of modern life — those of any other nation, 
perhaps all the other nations of the earth combined. The records of our Patent 
Office cover nearly half a million of these new factors of civilization, among 
them very many, if not the majority, of those which have given the nineteenth 
century its preeminence for material progress. To trace their origin and 
influence individually, much more, to try to estimate their value, would require 
volumes. We must be content here to notice briefly a few of the more notable 
and important of them, grouped for convenience according to their primary 
effect on one or other of the great departments of industrial and social life. 

INVENTIONS AFFECTING AGRICULTURE., 
Great inventions are not necessarily large or costly. The scythe is a 
simple tool, and inexpensive; yet the practical perfecting of it by Joseph Jenks, 
almost at the outset of farm-life in New England, is an epoch-mark in agricul- 
ture. It was the beginning of a new order of things. Putting curved fingers 
to the improved scythe-blade and snath, did for the harvester what had been 
done for the grass-cutter, gave him an implement which doubled or trebled his 
efficiency at a critical season, and furnished in the American grain cradle, a 
farm-tool perfect of its kind, and likely to hold its place as long as grain is 
grown on uneven ground. For the great bulk of grain and grain-cutting, the 
scythe and the cradle have been displaced by later American inventions — mow- 
ers and harvesters, operated by animal or steam power ; still they are likely to 
remain forever a part of every farm's equipment. Their utility is beyond 
computation. 

The plow supplied to the Colonial fanners, was as venerable as the reaping- 
hook. It had been substantially unimproved for four thousand years. 

The moment our people were free to manufacture for themselves, they set 
about its improvement in form and material. The very first patent granted by 
the National Patent Office being for an improved plow of cast-iron. The best 
plow then in use was a rude affair, clumsily made, hard to guide, and harder to 
draw. It had a share of wrought iron, roughly shaped by the roadside black- 
smith, a landside and standard of wood, and an ill-shaped mould-board plated 
with tin, sheet iron, or worn-out saw-plates. A stout man only could hold it, 
and a yoke of oxen were needed for work that a colt can do with a modern 
plow. Its improvement engaged the attention of many inventors, notably 
President Jefferson, who experimented with various forms and made a mathe- 



THE PLOW. 



507 



matical investigation of the shape of the mould-board, to determine the form 
best suited for the work. He was the first to discover the importance of straight 
lines from the sole to the top of the share and mould-board. Pinckney discov- 
ered the value of a straight line from front to rear. Jethro Wood discovered 
that all lines, from front to rear, should be straight. The method of drafting 
the lines, on a plane surface, in designing plows, is clue to Knox. The discovery 
of the importance of the centre-draught, and the practical means of attaining 
it by the inclination of the landside inward, is credited to Mears. Governor 
Holbrook, of New Hampshire, devised the method of making plows of any 
size symmetrical, so as to ensure the complete pulverization of the soil. Col. 
Randolph, Jefferson's son-in-law, "the best farmer in Virginia," invented a side- 
hill plow. Smith was the first to hitch two plows together ; and Allen, by 
combining a number of small plow-points in one implement, led the way to 
the production of the in- 
finite variety of horse-hoes, 
cultivators, and the like, for 
special use. But Jethro 
Wood, of New York, 18 19, 
and after, probably did more 
than any other man to 
perfect the cast-iron plow, 
and to secure its general 
use in place of the cumbrous 
plows of the earlier days. 
His skill as an inventor, and 
his pluck as a fighter against 
stolid ignorance and preju- 
dice, for the advancement 
of sensible plowing, cost him — what they ought to have gained for him — a 
fortune. The use of cast-iron plows had become general by 1825. 

A multitude of inventors have since improved the construction and material 
of plows, suiting them to different soils and uses ; the most valuable single 
improvement, probably, coming through the use of chilled iron, and the most 
promising from the application of steam power to plowing. The increase in the 
farmer's efficiency, by American improvements in plows, may be estimated from 
the fact that two million plowmen, with as many teams, would need to work 
every day in the year with the primitive plow to prepare the soil annually under 
cultivation in this country. To do the work in the plowing season would lie 
practically impossible. 

Coincident with the evolution of the plow was that of another epoch- 
marking American invention — the cotton gin of Eli Whitney, now just a century 




CHE SPEEDWELL [RON «'"KKs. MORRISTOWN, N.J. 
as forged the shaft for the Savannah, the first steamship which crossed the 
lere was manufactured the tires, axles ami cranks of the lost American 

Shop in which Vail and Baxter constructed the fin 
ted bj Morse, for exhibition before Congress. 



.,[.1: app.i- 



5o8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

old. When it was introduced the entire cotton crop of the country could have 
been grown on a single field of two hundred acres, and cotton was a costly 
product because of the labor required to separate the lint from the seed which 
bore it ; a good day's work of a man being four or five pounds of lint, or a bale 
of cotton in three months. Whitney's gin enabled a man to do the same work 
in six days. The new spinning and weaving machinery of Hargreaves, 
Arkwright, Cartwright, Samuel Crompton and others had opened an almost 
limitless market for raw cotton, and America could furnish the best. As a 
consequence of the cheaper and more rapid means of preparing it with the 
Whitney gin, the cotton crop of the South rose to sudden prominence. In 
1 800 it was eighteen million pounds ; the next year forty million. Ten years 
later it was eighty million pounds, -which product was more than doubled in the 
next ten years. In 1830 it was a million bales ; two millions in 1840 ; three in 
1851.; and "four in 1S60. Judged by its commercial and financial effects the 
cotton gin must be considered a benefit of the first magnitude ; judged by its 
social and political effects, it was, perhaps, the country's greatest bane. 
Without it slavery would have died out naturally in the South, as it did in the 
North ; with it, slavery became a power which changed unfavorably, not only 
the industrial character of the South, but the civil, political and industrial history 
of the entire country. Of its efficiency as a machine there can be no question. 
In its original form it enabled one man to do the work of fifteen ; in its improved 
modern form, steam-driven, it does the work of a thousand men. Without it 
modern cotton crops of eight or nine million bales would be impossible ; simply 
to pick the seeds out of the crop of 1891 in the old way would have kept the 
entire working population of the United States busy for a solid month. Its 
action, however, is very hurtful to the fibre, for which reason it may be regarded 
as one of the most wasteful and destructive of machines. Unfortunately, how- 
ever, there is nothing better to take its place. 

THRESHERS, MOWERS, AND REAPERS. 

The era of agricultural machinery began about 1S25, its earliest phase 
appearing in the application of horse-power to the threshing and cleaning of 
grain. Already the American tendency to seek practical results by the simplest 
means, and to make high-priced labor profitable by increasing its efficiency, 
had been shown in the improvement of a wide range of farmers' tools, almost 
everything they had to use being made lighter, neater, and more serviceable. 
The same improving, practical sense was displayed in devising more complicated 
labor-saving machines, which made it possible to do easily and directly what had 
been previously difficult or quite impossible to do. Too often, however, the 
early inventor was defeated by the lack of skilled labor and proper machine 
tools for making his improvements commercially successful. As soon as the 



MOWERS AXD REAPERS. 509 

mechanic arts had been sufficiently perfected and extended — largely by Ameri- 
can genius — the development and production of agricultural machinery became 
rapid and profitable. 

Washington had tried a sort of threshing machine as early as 1798 ; and 
one of the first patents issued by the Patent Office was lor an improved 
thresher ; yet the liail held the field until after 1825. In the next twenty-five 
years, over two hundred patents were granted for improvements in threshers, 
and since then they have numbered thousands. By 1840, most of the grain was 
threshed by horse-driven machinery. In 1853, when a famous trial ot rival 
threshers was held in England, the American machine did three times as much 
as the best English machine, and did it better. In a subsequent trial in France, 
the average work of experts with the flail being reckoned as one, that of the 
best French machine was twenty-five ; the best English machine, forty-one ; 
Pitt's American machine did the work of seventy-four. The application ot 
steam-power greatly increased the efficiency of threshing machines, raising the 
output from perhaps 2000 bushels a day to six or seven thousand for a single 
machine. 

Still more significant and important have been the victories of American 
inventors in connection with mowers and reapers. 

The circumstance that reaping by machinery was as old as the Christian 
era, and a multitude of comparatively modern attempts had been made, 
particularly in England, to apply horse power to the cutting of grass and 
grain, only added to the merit of inventors like Hussey and McCormick, 
who practically solved the problems invoked by means so simple and effi- 
cient that they have not been and are likely never to be entirely displaced. 
Hussey's mowing machine of 1833 had reciprocating knives working through 
slotted fingers, a feature not only new but essential to all practical grass 
and grain cutters, except the special type known as lawn-mowers. Mc- 
Cormick patented a combination reaper and mower in 1834, which he 
subsequently so improved as to make it the necessary basis of all reapers. 
In competitive trials at home and abroad, the American mowers and reapers 
have never failed to demonstrate their superiority over all others. 

Their first great victory, which gave them the world-wide fame they 
have so successfully maintained, was won in London in 185 1. In the 
competitive trial near Paris, in 1S55, the American machine cut an acre 
of oats in twenty-two minutes ; the English in sixty-six minutes ; the French 
in seventy-two. In the later competition, local and international, their 
superior efficiency has been not less signally manifested. By increasing the 
efficiency of the harvester twenty-fold (and twice that by the self-binders), 
these products of American invention have played a part second only to 
railroads in opening up the West to profitable cultivation, rapidly converting 



5i° 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



r 

J 



a wilderness into the granary of the world. Devices for binding grain 
as it was cut began to be developed about 1855. The first machine 
used wire binders ; the later twine. The combination of reapers and 
threshers in one machine has been most largely developed in California. 
The largest in use there weighs eight tons ; and, pushed by thirty mules, 
cuts a swath twenty-two feet wide and eighteen miles long in a day — over 
forty-eight acres, yielding about as many tons of wheat, which is cut, 
threshed, cleaned and deposited in 700 sacks. The machine employs a 
driver, a shearer, a knife-tender, and a sack-lowerer — four men, costing 

eight dollars a day for wages. 
^ ""*\ Less important individually, yet in the aggre- 

gate of incalculable assistance to agriculture, 
have been a multitude of American inven- 
tions intended 
to expedite 
and lighten 
the farmer's 
work — stump 
and stone ex- 
tractors for 
clearing the 
ground, ditch- 
ing machines 
for drainage 
systems, fenc- 
ing devices, 
particularly 
the barbed 
wire f e n c e, 
special plows 
for break- 
ing up new 
ground, harrows of many types, seeders, planters, cultivators, horse rakes, hay 
tedders and hay loaders, potato and rock diggers, corn huskers and shellers, 
cotton pickers, and countless other labor-saving tools and devices. In most 
cases these improved appliances enable one man to do easily the work of 
several working with primitive tools. With the help of machine planters and 
seeders the farmer's work is made at least five times more efficient ; with cul- 
tivators, ten times ; with potato diggers, twenty ; in harrowing, thirty ; in 
mowing and harvesting, from twenty to fifty ; with corn huskers and shellers, 
a hundred. The latest cotton harvester, employing a team, a driver, and a 
helper, does the work of forty hand-pickers. 




,110'.' IN WHICH llir. FIRS'! MORSE INSTRUMENT WAS CONSTRUCTED FOR EXHIBITION BEFORE 
CONGRESS. 



INVENTIONS AND MANUFACTURES. 511 

It is estimated that over two-thirds of the value of farm implements now in 
use is in the improved machinery which distinguishes American farming. Such 
machines are, individually, more costly than the appliances they have displaced, 
but their superior efficiency makes them cost far less for a given amount of pro- 
duct, while, by making it possible for a few to feed the many, they have set free 
for other pursuits the vast numbers employed in the various useful occupations 
characteristic of modern civilization. In this way, and by extending the area of 
possible cultivation and greatly cheapening all lood products, they have had a 
wider influence, probably, than any other group of American inventions. In 
connection with improvements in means of transportation — largely of American 
origin — they have changed the food conditions of half the world, making food 
more abundant, more varied, more wholesome, more secure, and vastly cheaper 
than ever before. At the same time they have lightened the farmer's labor, 
shortened his hours of toil, increased his gains, and quite transformed his social 
and industrial position. 

INVENTIONS AND MANUFACTURES. 

In every art they were allowed to practice the colonial mechanics and 
manufacturers showed a tendency to work on independent lines, and to improve 
upon the means and methods brought from the old country. There were few 
chances for making radical changes, however, until the Revolution brought indus- 
trial freedom. Then inventions seem to have come with a sudden outburst, the 
fruit partly of Revolutionary conditions and needs, more largely, perhaps, of 
wants long felt and desires repressed. 

< )wing to the undeveloped state of the mechanic arts generally, the want of 
machinery and exact working tools (not yet invented) and the scarcity of money 
for experimental ventures, the early inventors were rarely able to carry out 
successfully their more ambitious projects ; yet they accomplished enough to 
prove them worthy progenitors of the most inventive people the world has ever 
known. Many of them were giants in respect to creative genius, and fully 
abreast of the best their age afforded, whether in scientific knowledge or in 
mechanical skill: and some of them, like Oliver Evans, left an impress upon the 
arts which a century of progress has not been able to entirely efface or supersede. 

Primarily a millwright, Evans found the art of flour-milling traditional, crude, 
and unskillfully developed. He left it organized, practical, systematic, almost 
automatic. For a lot of disconnected, wasteful, and laborious processes he 
substituted a series of neat and simple machines and attachments which saved 
hall the cost for labor and supervision, increased the yield of flour, improved its 
quality and raised the traditional practice of millers to the dignity of an art. 
For more than half a century the flour and grist mill remained substantially as 
he left it, improved as to details but in no way radically changed. The mills of 



Si 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Europe as well as of America were revolutionized by his methods ; and some 
of his devices are likely to remain permanent if not essential contributions to the 
art of handling and milling - grain. 

Less widely known and appreciated, but quite as radical, and perhaps 
more valuable ultimately, were the services of Evans in other departments, 
particularly in connection with the utilization of steam, then the great problem 
of advanced mechanics. His contemporaries, working with low-pressure steam, 
naturally encountered fewer mechanical difficulties, and some were able to 
achieve more immediate and conspicuous financial results, but not any of them 
surpassed him in the real value of their work. The type of engine now in 
most general use for all purposes and absolutely necessary for many — the loco- 
motive engine, for instance — is the non-condensing, a type of engine conspicu- 
ously American in development, as in origin. Primarily, we owe it to Evans, 
who, far in advance of his age, appreciated the value of the elastic force of 
confined steam as a source of motive power, and was the first to utilize it in a 
successful non-condensing high-pressure engine. As early as 1 768 he was 
experimenting with steam, and was able to drive a small boat by means of 
steam and paddle wheels ; but the century ended before he had brought his 
engine to anything like commercial perfection. In 1786 he applied to the State 
of Pennsylvania for a patent on the application of his engine to driving mills 
and to a steam carriage, but his petition was denied by the same conservative 
body which at first refused him a patent for his improvements in grist-milling. 
There was then no national patent office for the encouragement of men of 
original ideas ; if there had been, the practical development of the steamboat 
and the steam-carriage might have been materially hastened, for Evans was 
apparently diverted from this line of work for a dozen years or more. In 1800 
he returned to it, and built a novel and relatively inexpensive non-condensing 
engine, designed for application to a steam-carriage, but for financial reasons 
set to working a plaster mill. A year or two after he built an engine of 150 
horse-power for parties in New Orleans, who set it up in the boat for which it 
was intended. But a long season of low water prevented a trial of the boat, and 
wasted capital compelled the owners to take the engine out and set it to work 
in a lumber mill, where it did such good service that the steamboat project 
was abandoned. It was thus no fault of Evans' that the pioneer engine, of the 
type afterwards adopted for western river navigation, did not win for him the 
fame subsequently achieved by Fulton. In 1804 Evans built for Philadelphia 
a steam-dredger, which, set on wheels, propelled itself along the streets to the 
river, where it was launched and the engine applied to its stern-wheel, when as 
a steamboat it was navigated about the Schuylkill. About the same time Evans 
submitted to the Lancaster Turnpike Company plans and estimates of cost 
and profits of a system of steam-carriage — a project too far in advance of the 



THE AMERICAN NAIL MACHINE. 513 

age to meet with proper consideration. A railway followed the same route a 
generation later. 

As the introducer of the non-condensing type of engine, however, Evans 
did greatest service to manufacturing, for the field opened up by him has been 
cultivated with conspicuous success by later American inventors, who have 
made the high-pressure engine peculiarly their own. To attempt to follow the 
development of this standard type of the great industrial motor of the age 
would quickly carry us beyond the scope of the present enquiry ; much more 
impossible would it be to estimate its influence upon the productive arts the 
world over. 

The first single machine of American production to become widely famous 
as a triumph of ingenuity and mechanical skill was the nail-machine of Jacob 
Perkins, patented in 1795, but not commercially developed until 1S10, by which 
time more than a million dollars had been spent in perfecting it, proof at once 
of its promise and of the urgent need of a machine to do its work. At that 
time nails were mostly imported, and cost twenty-five cents a pound, a price 
which made them too costly' for many uses for which they were greatly needed. 
They were all hand-wrought, chiefly at chimney-corner forges, where, in New 
England, farmers and lumbermen, fishermen and laborers employed their even- 
ings and other times of slack work — winters, stormy weather, odd times gen- 
erally, hammering nails. In Europe, especially in manufacturing districts of 
England, it was a common domestic industry, often employing whole families, 
but chiefly women and children, ill-paid, over-worked, and toiling under social 
conditions of the most appalling character. 

THE AMERICAN NAIL MACHINE 

Promptly displaced this domestic industry here, and more slowly that of 
Europe, by making it possible to use power in nail-making, while enabling a 
workman to do in a minute the previous task of an hour. The price of nails 
was speedily reduced two-thirds, subsequently much more, with an assured 
supply equal to any demand. The early cut nails were not so tough as the 
hand-made nails, but for most purposes they were neater and better ; while ant 
desired toughness was ultimately secured by annealing, and by the use of steel, 
particularly steel wire. Every style of nail, from the smallest tack to the rail- 
road spike, is now made by machinery, at a cost but little above that of the raw 
metal, the forms being as various as their manifold uses. 

Scarcely less noteworthy for its industrial effect was another invention of 
that early period, the Blanchard lathe,' developed in 1S19 — an invention which 
made possible for the first time the turning of irregular forms, and contained 
the generic idea of all machines for duplicating shapes, in wood or metal, by a 
model in conjunction with blanks. Only a machinist, familiar with the history 
33 



5 i 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of mechanical processes and working machines, can appreciate its far-reaching 
importance, not only as a time- and labor-saving tool, but as the basis of a long 
list of automatic machines for doing rapidly and exactly work that only the most 
skillful artisans can perform, and that slowly and at much greater cost. 

Though the fundamental problems of spinning and weaving by machinery 
had been solved before the textile arts could be transplanted to our shores, the 
contributions of American inventors to them have been many and important. 
The jealous care with which England guarded the new devices which were ena- 
bling her manufacturers to monopolize this field, no doubt had something to do 
in determining originally the special character of American textile machinery, 
but the practical genius of our people must have had even greater influence. 
Certain it is that from the first the organization and equipment of our mills have 
been different from, and in some respects better than, the English. 

As not so much as sketches of mill machinery were allowed to go out of 
England in the early days of American cotton and woolen milling, Slater, Low- 
ell, and the rest of our pioneers could import nothing : they had to build from 
memory, or according to general ideas, and to solve anew many of the special 
problems of construction and operation. Hence, while their first efforts were 
sometimes crude and unsatisfactory, the ultimate result was the development of 
the lighter, neater and more efficient type of machinery characteristic of American 
mills. Even where the general pattern was English, the finer and tougher Ameri- 
can iron made it possible to build the moving parts of machinery so much lighter, 
as to greatly lessen the power required. With improved designs, the gain was 
often as much as fifty per cent., as in the case of the Sawyer spindle. American 
cards also have always been lighter than the English, hence they run faster and 
more cheaply, and do better work. In both cotton and woolen mills American 
made looms are usually preferred ; and in not a few notable instances, looms 
and other machinery of American origin have become the standard the world 
over. One of the best known achievements in this line is the automatic loom 
of William Compton, for fancy weaving, patented in 1837, and first used at 
Lawrence, Massachusetts, three years later. Most of the fancy cassimeres, 
ginghams, shawls, and other figured fabrics produced throughout the world, are 
woven on Compton looms. Horstman's power loom for silk-weaving, invented 
about the same time, has been similarly far-reaching in its influence, being more 
used in Europe than here. 

Still more conspicuously useful, not to say epoch-marking industrially, was 
the Bigelow carpet loom. The problem of weaving figured carpets by power 
had been given up in Europe as impossible and hopeless, when Bigelow attacked 
it with such success that the bulk of the world's carpets have since been woven 
upon it ; while the cost of carpets has been so reduced, chiefly by its time- and 
labor-saving virtue, that what was before a luxury of the wealthy has now be- 



THE LOOM AND SPINDLE. 



515 



come the conven.ence and comfort of all. The more recent positive motion 
loom of Lyall, by which fabrics of any width can be woven, is a scarcely less 
notable and important contribution of American invention to the textile arts, 
and one that has had much to do in raising our carpet industry to its present 
supremacy, the United States now being by far the largest producer, as well as 
user of carpets in the world, the single city of Philadelphia producing more 
than all of Great Britain, our nearest rival. 

A striking illustration of the progress of recent years in textile production 
was shown at the Atlanta Exhibition in 1881, where a group of men and 




THE MANNER OF CONNECTING 'HIE AEROPLANES AM) ATTACHING THE SCREWS. 



A is a casing partly wood and partly brass and whic 
Two bars of steel operating freely in a vertical direction, 
angle of planes ; E and F, Steel plates to which aeroplai 
wires are attached to prevent the twisting of the machim 
Wires for relieving the parts from strains set up by centr 



i a horizontal steel shaft ; B. The screw-propeller ; C, The aeroplane • D, D, 
upported by four horizontal bars pivoted at G, G ; H, H, Indices showing the 
ttached ; L. Long horizontal bar of Steel and wood to the ends of which steel 
n motion; I, Chain connecting the aeroplane with the dynamometer; K, K, 



women made cloth with hand-cards, spinning-wheels, and hand-loom, alongside 
modern spinning and weaving machinery. They worked on a coarse fabric, 
and in ten hours five operators could make eight yards. Five operators in a 
modern mill easily make eight hundred yards of the same fabric in the same 
time. With finer goods the advantage is still more in favor of machinery. A 
tender of a spinning-mule in a cotton mill spins six hundred times as much as 
one could spin with an old-fashioned spinning-wheel ; three thousand times as 
much as could be spun with a distaff; thirty thousand times as much as a 



5 i6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Lapland woman of to-day spins, using one hand on the knee to twis^ threads 
drawn backward by the other hand. 

Scarcely less astonishing has been the progress recently made in the pro- 
duction of all useful articles in wood and metal, due very largely to American 
inventions. A type of these is the famous Woodworth planer, patented in 
1828 ; an invention which, by substituting quick-acting, power-driven machinery 
for hand-tools slowly pushed by muscular force, not only enabled one workman 
to do the work of twenty-five, but cheapened the finished lumber and greatly 
increased the possible supply. The economical replacing of human skill and 
strength by clever mechanism, as exhibited by the planer, is, indeed, nowhere 
more characteristically shown than in the development of the almost endless 
variety of American wood-working machinery ; a field of invention naturally 
falling largely to Americans, the vast demand for manufactured lumber in our 
rapidly growing communities, together with the scarcity and high price of labor, 
making such helps absolutely necessary. In his report on this class of machinery 
at the Paris Exposition of 1S67, Professor Reauleaux happily described the 
characteristics of American inventors, as shown in such machines, and not less 
so in all others. "They are distinguished from Europeans," he said, "by more 
direct and rapid conception. The American aims straightway for the needed 
construction, using the means which appear to him to be the simplest and most 
effective, whether new or old." . . "The American really constructs in 
accordance with the severest theoretical abstraction, observing on the one side 
a distinctly marked-out aim, weighing on the other the already available means, 
or creating new ones ; then proceeding, regardless of precedents, as straight as 
possible for the object." In 1867 the American wood-working machines stood 
first for originality, variety and. excellence ; a rank which they have not lost and 
are not likely to lose. 

In iron-working machinery the genius of American inventors is not less 
conspicuously manifested. The cut-nail machine was the precursor of an endless 
series of powerful machines and special tools for doing rapidly, easily, exactly 
and cheaply an infinite variety of work, apparently demanding at every stage 
more than human intelligence, decision, promptness, certainty of action, and 
sensitive skill. Superior mechanics are now employed, not so much in producing 
things of popular use, as in constructing the special machinery required for 
making such things by the million cheaply and at lightning speed often, a gross 
costing for labor not more, perhaps, than a single article would if made by hand. 
The manufacture of machinery has thus become a characteristic branch of 
American industry, which is developing into the manufacture of manufacturing 
plants, with all parts designed, built, organized and set to work to produce a 
predetermined result as harmoniously and economically as a well-made single 
machine will make a nail, a fish-hook, or a screw. 



THE INTERCHANGEABLE SYSTEM. 5 17 

This, the highest product of mechanical and business evolution, is the 
outgrowth of a typical American improvement in mechanics, involving not one 
invention, but thousands — the Interchangeable System, first applied to the 
manufacture of firearms, but now common in all manufactures involving detach- 
able parts, from watches to locomotives. In organizing a gun-making plant 
about the beginning of the century, Eli Whitney made the first attempt to apply 
the principle ; but gun-making still involved too much hand-work, always vari- 
able, to make complete success possible. In planning, building, and directing 
the U. S. Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Superintendent Hall carried the system 
much further, indeed to practical demonstration, inventing machinery, adopting 
the inventions of others, and greatly improving many time-honored processes to 
obtain more uniform results, especially in the construction of gun-locks. Barrel- 
turning, forging under a trip-hammer, and Blanchard lathes for turning gun- 
stocks were among the newly-adopted improvements. In 1827 a hundred Hall 
rifles, made at Harper's Ferry in 1S24, were taken apart and the metal parts 
reassembled and remounted on new stocks, with fairly good fitting. The inter- 
changeability, though not up to modern standards of exactness, was a practical 
fact — an epoch-making achievement. Less hand-work and more exact machine- 
work, involving close forging" with steel dies, exact cutting with milliner machines, 
and other improvements in means and methods of working, were necessary for 
securing the perfect interchangeability of all parts in a gun or a machine ; but 
American mechanics were equal to the task. When, at the World's Fair in 
London, in 1851, the results of the interchangeable system applied to the manu- 
facture of firearms were exhibited, they naturally created great astonishment. It 
was a distinctively American improvement in the mechanic arts, and an important 
one. Its advantages were so striking that the system was speedily adopted by 
the British Government, and American machinery was purchased for its appli- 
cation to gun-making in the new British Arsenal at Enfield. Other European 
Governments followed suit with large and numerous orders for American 
machinery, and large quantities of American arms were purchased for supplying 
immediate needs. One of the most notable of these contributions of American 
mechanics to Europe was the recent supplying of gun-making plants to the 
Prussian Government Armories at Spandau, Erfort, and Dantzig, displacing the 
best machinery that Europe could produce. 

In peaceful arts the interchangeable system has proved quite as 
economical, and vastly more useful than in the making of military arms, 
— in the manufacture of agricultural machinery, sewing machines, writing 
machines, locomotives, and the like. Variability, the joy of the artist and 
the bane of the mechanic, is done away in this system. The products are 
not only uniform as a whole, but the individual parts are alike, and able 
to take their proper place and perform their proper function in any machine, 



5 iS THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

so that special fitting is avoided, the cost of making and repairing is 
greatly diminished, and the purchaser can depend on the assured good 
behavior of the entire mechanism, however complicated. 

The influence of American invention upon manufacturing is shown quite 
as conspicuously in materials as in methods, and even more in providing 
new or improved means of utilizing natural forces. The development of 
machinery for making boots and shoes, for example, distinctively the work 
of American inventors, has not merely cheapened the product, and widened 
the shoe-wearing area, so to speak, thereby increasing the demand, but it 
has entirely changed the conditions under which boots and shoes are made, 
which reacts in turn upon the character and habits of boot and shoe 
makers. When the material as well as the modes of working is new, 
as in the case of vulcanized rubber, the influence of the invention is more 
radical and far-reaching. Scarcely less so when the material is not new 
but is so cheapened by improved methods of production as to vastly extend 
the range of its application, as in the case of steel ; or still more vitally, 
where the new process, like the electric smelting of aluminium, brings a 
useful substance for the first time fairly into the field of commercial production 
and economical utilization. 

HARNESSING NATURAL FORCES. 

In all these ways American inventors have contributed more than their 
quota to the elements of industrial progress. Not less noteworthy has been 
their work in taming and harnessing the natural forces. In the employment of 
water-power in milling, and in improving the simple water-wheels of their day, the 
early colonists were not more forward than their successors have been in solving 
the practical problems of the turbine wheel and in its industrial employment. 
Blest above all other countries in the abundance of available water-power, 
America leads the world in its use for manufacturing purposes, although as yet we 
are utilizing less than half of one per cent, of the amount that remains unem- 
ployed, while river and tidal currents not yet harnessed multiply a thousand-fold 
the visible sources of working power which will some day be brought under sub- 
jection. In the utilization of the limitless force of direct sunshine, Ericsson and 
others have done what Evans, Perkins, Stevens, and other pioneer inventors 
did with high-pressure steam in their day — have taken the first steps, always the 
hardest and least conspicuous in immediate visible results. Their history is for 
the future to make and tell. Broadly speaking, the same is true of heat engines, 
electro-thermal engines, and the use of electric motors in manufacturing, now 
more or less successfully inaugurated. And further on along the furthest 
frontier of the known, science and invention catch glimpses of new forces, new 
materials, and new methods of working, by which, when fully grasped, the 



INVENTION AND DOMESTIC LIFT. 519 

mechanic arts are all but certain to be transformed more rapidly and more 
radically than ever in the past. From present intimations, certain clues, and 
inevitable tendencies, it requires no prophet to foresee results that must dwarf 
to relative littleness the greatest achievements of to-day. 

If suddenly translated to a modern house, reasonably well provided with 
modern conveniences, our great-grandparents would be almost as much at a 
loss as a visitor from another planet. They would see scarcely anything tamiliar 
or easily understood, while the more recondite of our conveniences — fires with- 
out visible fuel or ashes, lights without oil or wicking, conversation at long range 
by whispering to a spot on the wall, summons for service by the silent touching 
of a button, and so on — would seem nothing short of magical. Strip a modern 
house of all the things of use and convenience unknown fifty years ago. things 
directly due to recent inventions or made possible by recently invented means 
and methods of production, and how much would be left ? Everything, from 
the kitchen stove to the piano in the parlor, is more or less a novelty, and is 
what it is because of a shorter or longer series of developments, every step of 
which was punctuated by a patent, the official certification of an invention, in 
nine cases out often an American invention. The piano has the place of honor, 
but its influence on national life is as nothing to that of the cast-iron kitchen 
stove — a characteristic American convenience. 

As Jefferson supplemented his honorable achievements as a statesman by 
not less honorable efforts to improve the humble but useful plow, so that other 
philosopher and nation-builder, Ben Franklin, essayed the family stove, con- 
tributing to human welfare thereby, perhaps, more than by his political, scientific, 
or philosophic labors. As early as 1 745 he invented the enclosed fireplace still 
known as the Franklin stove, a device unequaled for the wholesome warming 
of a room. A quarter of a century later he invented a smoke-consuming stove, 
with a downward draught, for burning bituminous coal. Not long after, 
Rumford, scarcely second to Franklin as an organizing genius and practical 
scientist, invented cooking ranges lined with fire brick and soapstone, with venti- 
lating ovens — perfect in principle but clumsy in the making, because the art of 
casting iron in thin plates had not yet been mastered. In solving that problem 
in 1S35, Jordan L. Mott. the pioneer in introducing self-feeding stoves for 
anthracite coal, made one of the most widely useful improvements in the 
metallurgy of iron. 

About the same time the learned Dr. Eliphalet Nott, so long the honored 
President of Union College, took up the stove problem in its scientific and 
practical aspects, and spent much time and money in perfecting base-burning 
and other improved stoves. He was followed by scores of more or less suc- 
cessful inventors, who developed the base-burning, self-feeding principle, 
improved the construction of stove-grates, and devised innumerable forms ol 



520 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

stoves for various uses, practically perfecting this universal household conveni- 
ence, and raising the manufacture of stoves to the front rank among great 
industries. Stoves for burning petroleum and its products, gas stoves, and, 
latterly, stoves without any sort of fuel, heating and cooking by electricity, 
have become, or are becoming, common. Before long the now idle winds, the 
unimpeded currents of our rivers and coasts, the profitless sunshine of waste 
places, are likely to heat our rooms and do our cooking, as well as furnish light 
and motive power, through the medium of electricity. 

The social and industrial effects of the iron stove with its substitution of 
slow-burning and economical mineral fuel for the more costly and troublesome 
quick-burning wood, are paralleled in the improvement of household illumina- 
tion by the use of mineral oil since i860. From the dim and flickering tallow 
dip, to the sweeter and more durable candle of stearine and paraffin was a great 
step ; but much more considerable, in respect to convenience and economy, was 
the replacing of the smoky and ill-smelling whale-oil lamp by the cheap and 
brilliant kerosene burner. In towns and cities gas and electricity are and are 
likely to remain the great illuminants, though not as cheap as mineral oil ; but 
for the country generally the kerosene lamp commands the situation, and as 
perfected by recent inventions, it is able to hold its own in cheapness and 
brilliancy, the world over. The kerosene lamp, like the petroleum field whose 
refined product feeds it almost everywhere, is mainly of American origin and 
development. And the match which lights it — that most marvellous of little con- 
veniences — largely owes the cheapness which makes its employment universal, 
to the fundamental invention of an American, under whose patent of 1836 the 
manufacture of phosphorus matches on a large scale was first made possible. 
The social changes due to this cheap and handy little fire-stick have been too 
often enlarged upon, and are practically too fresh in memory to require more 
than the briefest mention here. 

More characteristically American in its development and more conspicuous 
in its visible effects, social and industrial, is the familiar sewing machine. 
Sporadic attempts to devise a machine that would imitate the motions of a 
sewing needle had been made for a hundred years or more, an English patent 
having been granted as early as 1755, for a device for embroidering, with which 
it was proposed to use a needle, pointed at both ends with the eye in the middle, 
to go backward and forward through the cloth. It does not appear to have been 
practically developed. In 1790 Thomas Saint made a working machine for 
sewing leather and heavy cloth. It made a chain stitch, using an awl and a 
needle. Later attempts about the beginning of the century, contributed little to 
the solution of the problem, but served to keep the idea alive. Rev. John A. 
I >odge, of Monkton, Vermont, aided by a clever mechanic, John Knowles, built 
an approximately practical machine for sewing the back-stitch with a double 



SEWING MACHINES. 521 

pointed needle ; but failed to develop it commercially, owing, it was claimed, 
to pressure of professional duties. Several other "might-have-beens" fol- 
lowed chief among them Walter Hunt, of New York, who made and sold 
several working machines in 1832-54, but neglected to apply for a patent. 
He used two threads, the upper carried by a curved needle, with the 
eye at the point, the lower by a shuttle ; the two making a lock-stitch. 
The value of the invention was not appreciated until Howe, and Wilson, 
and Singer had proved the commercial importance of sewing by machinery ; 
and then the evidence of Hunt's originality, filed with an application for a 
patent, came too late to benefit him, his rights having been forfeited by the 
delay. 

Howe's machine, patented in 1846, used, like Hunt's, a curved, eye-pointed 
needle, and a shuttle below the cloth, with original devices of such efficiency 
that the combination was regarded by the Patent Office as a new and useful 
invention. Though the practical parent of the modern sewing machine, it was 
not in itself a successful machine, nor was Howe at first successful in enlisting 
capital to aid him in developing from it a good machine. In the course of four 
or five years the defective details were corrected or displaced by the work of 
other inventors in great numbers, who attacked the problems of the sewing 
machine, as soon as their importance became generally appreciated. The years 
1849 and 1850 were prolific in inventions in connection with the fundamental 
movements of sewing machinery, and since then the patents on movements and 
attachments have numbered thousands. 

The Singer machine, which closely resembled Howe's, but did what Howe's 
could not — good work — came into the field in 1850 and took the lead in sales 
until 1854. The Grover & Baker machine became most popular for four or 
five years, then the Wheeler & Wilson for ten years ; afterward the Singer 
regained the lead. In the meantime, all the companies were infringing on the 
rights of Howe, who, after expensive litigation, won his case and entered into 
an agreement with the great manufacturing companies, receiving five dollars for 
each machine made until i860 ; after that, on a renewal of his patent, one dollar 
a machine. There is no record of the number of machines made and sold prior 
to the compact of 1856. Between that date and 1S77, when the last of the 
foundation-patents expired, over six million machines were sold by the numer- 
ous manufacturers of the United States. Two-thirds that number were estimated 
to be then in use, representing an investment of over two hundred million 
dollars. The sewing machines in use in 1S91 were valued at fully half a billion 
dollars. Though the great bulk of these machines are held for family use, the 
factory machines were estimated to give (the world over) employment to 
20,000,000 persons, mostly women. In social, not less than industrial, effects 
the sewing machine has been simply revolutionary. 



522 THE STORY OE AMERICA. 

Thanks to its cheap and rapid stitching, and the serviceableness of its 
numerous attachments, the clothing of half the world has been improved in 
appearance, increased in quantity, and materially cheapened by it. Indeed, it 
would be hard to find a region so remote as not to have felt its influence in 
some way. 

Of the multitude of other inventions which have had a shaping influence 
on social habits and conditions, none, perhaps, has had a broader or deeper 
effect than our cheap yet accurate time-pieces, the Yankee clock, and the later 
and higher achievement of scientific manufacturing, the American watch. We 
commonly think of them as time-recording instruments merely ; their more 
valuable function is as time-savers. To appreciate the significance of this phase 
of their influence, one has only to go to Mexico or any other country where 
time-pieces are little used, where the habit of making and keeping time engage- 
ments has not been acquired, and half one's days are wasted waiting for those 
who take no note of time, even by its loss. 

The pioneer in American clock-making was Eli Terry, of Plymouth, Con- 
necticut, who was also the first clock peddler, in the latter part of the last and 
the beginning of the present century — a practical missionary of a new era. As 
the means and methods of cutting the wooden wheels were improved, the clocks 
were greatly cheapened. Chauncey Jerome, an apprentice of Terry, was espe- 
cially successful in reducing the cost and improving the quality of these primi- 
tive time-keepers. In 1841 he sent a cargo of Connecticut clocks to England, 
billed at so low a figure that the customs officers seized them for under-valua- 
tion, paying him his price plus ten per cent., as the law directed. The second 
cargo, much to his delight, met with the same reception. With the third, the 
tardily-enlightened Government allowed him to seek a less convenient customer. 
Already (in 1837) Mr. Jerome had brought out the machine-made brass clock, 
which revolutionized the business of clock-making and sent a timepiece into every 
house. The metal movements were stamped from sheet-brass so rapidly that 
three men with one machine could cut out the works of five hundred clocks a 
day, reducing the cost of a clock-movement to fifty cents. At this rate the sale 
was enormous. The metal clocks, unlike the wooden clocks, could stand any 
climate, and this, with their astonishing cheapness, gave them world-wide accept- 
ance. The substitution of steel springs for weights added to the cheapness but 
not to the accuracy of the modern clock ; and clocks to run a week, a month, a 
year, and even a hundred years, with one winding, are now produced in infinite 
variety, from sizes no bigger than a watch to the largest and most costly tower 
and astronomical clock. 

The progress made in the perfecting of clock movements and in the 
extension of the manufacture of clocks was especially rapid after the Civil War. 
In the first two decades there was an advance of from five- to six-fold in the 



AMERICAN WATCH. 523 

number of hands employed, in the wages paid, in the capital engaged, and in 
the value of the products. 

The electric time service, by which all the standard timepieces of the 
country are kept in perfect regulation to the hundredth part of a second by the 
co-operating clocks of the great astronomical observatories, is perhaps the 
highest possible index of the exact and exacting respect for time, characteristic 
of American sagacity. Indeed, the safety and certainty of modern social and 
business movements, with instant electric communication and rapid transit, 
would be impossible were accurate timepieces less common, and the machinery 
of modern life would be thrown into confusion by their general derangement. 

THE AMERICAN WATCH. 

As a factor in the development of these imperative social conditions, the 
inexpensive and trustworthy American watch deserves more than the brief 
notice permitted it here. Under the old system of watchmaking as developed 
in Europe the various parts of watches were made by different artisans, in dif- 
ferent establishments, employing fifty skilled trades ; the parts were then 
assembled and fitted by the watchmaker proper in a separate shop. The manu- 
facture of clocks by machinery had proved not only feasible, but profitable. 
The necessary cost of hand labor forbade the making of watches in this country. 
Was it possible to apply to their production a system of machinery similar to 
that which had succeeded so well with the larger and coarser timepieces ? Mr. 
Dennison, a watch repairer, and Mr. Howard, a clockmaker, both of Boston, 
thought it might be. 

More than that, they studied the problem practically at home and abroad, 
and, in 1850, boldly attacked what all experts confidently pronounced an impos- 
sible task. They carried their constructive task to a demonstration ; but, like 
too many pioneers, they lacked capital for carrying their undertaking to com- 
mercial success. That was accomplished by the American Watch Company, 
which took up the task where Dennison & Howard were obliged to leave it, 
and, by patiently perfecting machinery and methods, succeeded in making under 
one roof every part of a perfect watch, at a cost so low that the machine-made 
watches were able to compete with the cheapest productions of Switzerland, 
which had been previously imported, to the number of three or four hundred 
thousand a year. By 1876 the number of watches imported was reduced to 
seventy-five thousand. Since then the exportation of American watches 
to all parts of the world has been extensive, more than balancing importations ; 
and they have been able to compete everywhere with the best, in excellence, 
as well as with the cheapest in price. For railway service, the most exacting 
of all fields, they have become the accepted standard. The orderly operation 
of national and international railway systems are now for the most part, deter- 



524 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



mined and regulated by this potent and serviceable product of American 
machinery. The labor of millions of working people is timed by it, and it 
enters as a regulating and guiding factor into every movement of unnumbered 
households. Who can estimate the service of such a social factor ? 

These are but a few of the American inventions that have vitally influenced 
the development of modern social and domestic conditions ; inventions which 
have revolutionized transportation, like the locomotive ; communication, like the 
telegraph, the telephone, the type-writer ; food conditions, like desiccated and 
canned provisions, cold storage and refrigerator cars ; the warming of houses by 
steam and hot air, etc. It would take not one, but many chapters to do them 
even the scant justice accorded to the few already touched upon. 




SUSPENSION 1SKIDGE, NIAGARA FALLS. 




CHAPTER XXIX. 

THE SA.VITMQ OK LIKE. 

T is a long way from the willful destruction of human life to its 
intended saving ; from the settled and criminal neglect of care 
for life by individuals and by communities to organized and sys- 
tematic action having for its end the preservation of life in every 
instance and emergency. Nor does anything more sharply mark 
essential differences in social and moral status among nations, or 
the contrast between periods in the history of given nations, than 
the disregard or care for that. 
But the way, long as it may be. has been traversed alike by individuals 
and by the State in our own country. It will be the purport of the present 
chapter to exhibit the results rather than the stages of the journey, and it may 
well enough open with such description as is practicable of the means provided 
by the United States Government for the deliverance of mariners and other 
travelers from perils by sea. For now, in sharpest contrast to an old indiffer- 
ence to human life, nay, to the means sometimes employed to destroy the lives 
of unfortunates who suffered shipwreck, by their fellow-men on shore, alike the 
dwellers on our coasts and the Government of the United States are laboring, 
far and wide along our ocean borders and by our inland lakes, to deliver human 
life from the greed of the ravening sea. 

First, by The Lighthouse System, with its twenty-five hundred and seventy- 
four (2574) lighted and its five thousand and eleven (501 1) unlighted "aids 
to navigation." * Of these, the lighthouse is, of course, the chief, and 
the degree of improvement in its construction and illuminating power is the 
gauge of thought and toil that have been put forth to make it effective for its 

* Annual Report of United States Lighthouse Board for the year ending June 30, 1S91. The 
lighted "aids" are lighthouses and beacon lights, including 209 post-lights, light-ships in position, 
light-ships for relief, electric buoys in position, gas buoys in position, and post-lights on the west- 
ern rivers. The unlighted "aids" are fog signals operated by steam or by hot air, the same 
operated by clockwork, day beacons, whistling buoys in position, bell buoys in position, and 
other buoys in position, including pile buoys and stakes, and thirty buoys in Alaskan waters. 

525 



526 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



work. Its light has been defined by competent authority* as one "so modified 
and directed as to present to the mariner an appearance which shall at once 
enable him to judge of his position during the night in the same manner as the 
sight of a landmark would do during the day." In order that it shall be seen 
at considerable distances, it is requisite that it have a certain elevation, the height 
determined by the rotundity of the earth. Thus, a light placed on the shore 
at an elevation of fifteen feet will be visible about four and one-half nautical 
miles out to sea ; one raised to fifty feet, about eight nautical miles, and a light 
elevated to one hundred feet will be visible about eleven' and one-half nautical 
miles to sea.f 

It has already been said that improvement in constructing lighthouses 




A LIGHT SHIP. 



and in their illuminating power measures the increase of the purpose to make 
them instruments for the saving of human life. Bright, indeed, is the vision of that 
purpose to-day in contrast with that discernible in the past, as may readily be seen. 
Among the finer lighthouses in the United States, perhaps the most noteworthy, 
is that first built in 1847-48, on Minot's Ledge, in Massachusetts Bay, off the town 
of Cohassett, twenty miles E. S. E. of Boston, Mass., and not far from that on 
Little Brewster Island, at the entrance to Boston Harbor, where the first light- 
house on the North American continent was built in 1 715-16, at a cost to the 
General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay * of £2, 285, 17s. 8^<d. This 



:;; Mr. Alan Stevenson, Scotch engineer. 

f Given approximately from the table by J. G. Barnard, American engineer. 



LIGHTHOUSE CONSTRUCTION. 527 

is accounted one of the most dangerous places in the world if left without a 
signal. And as a record of its construction illustrates the processes and the 
difficulties of lighthouse building, it is proposed to make a statement concerning 
it in some detail. The first construction on the Ledge, an iron framework with 
lighthouse at its top, having been swept away by a storm, with all who were in 
it. in April, 1851, it turned out that replacing it was to be a more difficult task 
than it had been to build the Eddystone, the Bell Rock, or the Skerryvore, 
examples of notable and difficult lighthouse construction in England ; for the 
foundation of the Eddystone, when laid, was all above low water, and a part of 
that foundation was even up to high-water level ; the foundation of the Bell 
Rock was not far from three feet above low water, while the Skerryvore had its 
foundation even above high-water level, whereas a good part of the foundation of 
the Minot's Light was below low water. " And," says General Alexander, of the 
United States Corps of Engineers, "there had to be a combination of favorable 
circumstances to enable us to land on the Minot Rock, at the beginning of that 
work — a perfectly smooth sea, a dead calm, and low spring tides. This could 
only happen six times during any one lunation — three at full moon and three at 
the change. Frequently one or other of the necessary conditions would fail, 
and there were at times months, even in summer, when we could not land there 
at all. Our working season was from April 1st, to September 15th. Work 
was prosecuted with all possible diligence for more than three years before a 
single stone could be laid.f " The difficulty was to cut the foundation rock into 
proper shape to receive the stones, and after that to lay them." 

The work-, commenced July 1, 1855, was finished September 15, i860, at a 
cost of about $300,000. Up to the level of the entrance door the structure is 
built solidly around a central well. Above that is a hollow cylindrical space, 
fourteen feet in diameter, arched at the level of the cornice, and divided into 
five stories by four iron floors, with spiral iron stairway and a trap-door on each 
floor. These five compartments, with a sixth immediately under the lantern in 
the top of the tower, make the keepers' rooms, store-rooms, etc. 

Still another "rock lighthouse" in the United States stands upon Spectacle 
Reef, in the northern part of Lake Huron, off the eastern end of the Straits of 
Mackinac. The least depth of water on the shoal is about seven feet, but at 
the site chosen for the lighthouse the rock (limestone covered with a layer of 
two feet of boulders) was found at a depth of eleven feet. The nearest land 
is ten miles and a half away. In the direction of the greatest exposure of the 

* It was supported by light-dues of one penny per ton on all incoming and outgoing vessels, 
except coasters, levied by the Collector of Imports at Boston. 

f It had been determined to build of stone, the superior value of inertia over strength, for light- 
houses in exposed situations, having been fully demonstrated. 



523 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



lighthouse to the waves the latter have a range of one hundred and seventy 
miles, but they are not such foes to its stability as the ice fields with which it 
contends in winter. These are thousands of acres in area and two feet in 
thickness, solidly frozen, and move with, a "living force" that is almost irresist- 
ible. In the spring of 1875 this ice was piled against the lighthouse to the 

height of thirty feet above the 
water, or seven feet above the 
sill of its doorway, which is 
twenty-three feet above the lake ; 
and when the keepers went to 
the station to exhibit the light 
(not in operation during the 
winter) they could only obtain 
entrance to the tower by cutting 
a passage through the pile of ice 
referred to. 

In the construction of this 
work, the first step was to sur- 
round the site of the proposed 
tower by a crib-work ninety-two 
feet square, filled with ballast- 
stone, called a "pier of protec- 
tion." This enclosed an interior 
opening forty-eight feet square. 
The arrangement gave a landing 
stage, and also an area for quar- 
ters for the workmen. It, more- 
over, secured still water in which 
to place the coffer-dam. That 
was cylindrical in form, thirty-six 
feet in exterior diameter, made 
of staves four inches thick, six 
inches wide, and fourteen feet 
long. These were carefully 
jointed, and were held together 
on the outside by three iron 
bands or hoops. Then they were braced and stayed in the strongest manner 
on their inside, against a centre post. 

This done the dam was sunk in the centre of the interior opening of the 
crib-work, the water within it exhausted, and the bottom leveled for the founda- 
tion of the lighthouse. The bottom was then made perfectly water-tight by 




THE NIGHT FA I ki iL. 



LIGHTHOUSE ILLUMINATION. 529 

filling it with concrete. Upon that the lighthouse tower was erected, thirty-two 
feet in diameter at the base and eighteen feet in diameter at the spring of its 
cornice, which was eighty feet above the base. The additional elevation for 
parapet, lantern, and roof made the total height of the lighthouse about one 
hundred feet. In this structure the tower is solid from its foundations for the 
height of thirty feet, all the stones having continuous dowels inserted to bind 
and hold them to each other. The light here was first exhibited June 1, 1874, 
labor having been commenced in May, 1870. Its cost was #,375,000, and it is 
regarded by the United States Lighthouse Board as their best specimen of 
monolithic stone masonry. Thus far, for lighthouses constructed of wood and 
of stone. The use of iron in places where it is allowable is now common in 
our system, alike on dry and on submerged foundations, and in the building of 
both skeleton and plate structures. Among the more prominent of iron towers 
are those at Cape Canaveral, in Florida, built in 1868, 150 feet high ; at Bolivar 
Point, in Texas, built in 1872, 120 feet high, and at Cape Henry, Va., 165 feet 
in height, built in 1881. The peculiar painting of the exterior of the last named 
tower makes it an excellent waymark. Indeed, the painting of specific light- 
houses in colors and in styles which are quickly recognized by mariners, and 
enables them at once to locate their own whereabouts with precision, is a pictur- 
esque feature of lighthouse outfit. 

A fourth material for construction is brick, and some of the brick towers 
are among the more important upon our coast. The Shinnecock (L. I.) Bay 
Light, and that at Cape Hatteras, N. C, may be instanced, and also that at St. 
Augustine, Florida, the last 165 feet high, built at a cost of $100,000, and 
painted in spiral stripes of diverse colors. 

Next to lighthouse construction, lighthouse illumination is of almost equal 
import. For however decided the advance in the former, with the resultant of 
stability and convenience, the interests of commerce and the safety of life were 
illy secured without a kindred progress in this element of effectiveness. That 
this has marked the years is evident. We are told that in 1673 the beacon at 
Point Allerton, Mass.,* was illuminated by " fier balls of pitch and ocum " [sic] 
burned in open braziers. The light on Little Brewster Island, in Boston 
Harbor, already referred to (built 17 18-19), was at first lighted by tallow can- 
dles. Then followed the spider-lamp, burning fish oil in the lantern, as it might 
have been set in a window. In 18 12 this was followed by sperm oil burned in 
a sort of Argand lamp in Winslow Lewis' "patent magnifying and reflecting 
lanterns," for which the government paid to the inventor the sum of $20,000 
This is described as consisting of a lamp (roughly constructed on the principle 

* Facts in this connection from "The Modern Lighthouse Service," by Arnold Burges 
Johnson, Chief Clerk United States Lighthouse Board, Washington, I). (.'., 1890. 
34 



S30 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of Argand's fountain lamp), a reflector, and a "magnifier." Mr. Lewis made 
no pretensions to optical knowledge, and his reflectors came about as near to a 
true paraboloid — the desideratum in shape — as did a barber's basin. In 1840 
the administration of this system was largely improved upon, but poor light was 
still the rule and good light the exception. In 1852, when the Lighthouse Estab- 
lishment was turned over to the Lighthouse Board, the reflectors in the towers 
began to be replaced by the Fresnel lenticular apparatus, found so successful 
in France and, more or less, throughout the world. 

The saving in oil effected by the use 
of the lenses, over reflectors, was so great 
that the expense of exchanging the one for 
the other was met in a few years, although 
the first cost of the lenses was quite large. 
The French system, in use since 1852, con- 
sists of a powerful central lamp emitting 
luminous beams in every direction, around 
which is placed an arrangement of glass, so 
formed as to refract these beams into parallel 
rays in required directions. The light may 
be fixed or revolving ; — in the latter case, by 
multiplying lenses, and special devices in 
connection with them, all the rays from the 
lamp are formed into an eight-angled drum 
and projected as required. In the case of 
a fixed light, another adaptation of the 
principle is called for, and a continuous belt 
of light in azimuth, instead of a series of 
beams nearly parallel to the axis of the 
circular lenses (as in the case of the revolving 
apparatus), is produced. The lamp is placed 
in the focus of the belt or drum of glass, and 
' says the Scotch lighthouse engineer, Mr. 
Alan Stevenson, "than an entire apparatus for a fixed light of the first order. 
1 know of no work of art more creditable to the boldness, ardor, intelligence 
ami zeal of the artist." 

The lantern which holds this apparatus, moreover, has now come to In- a 
creation, of itself and the whole arrangement an object worthy of study. A 
light of the first order stands twelve feet high and six in diameter, involving, in 
its structure some of the highest principles of applied science. The cost of the 
lenses alone varies from $.4250 to $8400. The distance from which they can 
be seen is only limited by the horizon. They might be seen, indeed, sixty, 




nothing can be more beautiful, 



THE LIGHTHOUSE HOARD. 531 

eighty, or even a hundred miles, if sufficient elevation could be gained from 
which to view them. All this lenticular apparatus was invented and constructed 
in France, and for many years Frenchmen supplied the world with it. The United 
States Government still orders its purchases from the same French house: of 
which it has long been a customer. 

The fuel for the lamps in the United States lighthouses is mineral oil, 
through all the establishment, and a burner has been invented which will keep a 
light burning in a place difficult and dangerous to reach in heavy weather — as at 
the heads of long piers built out into lakes and sounds to make harbors — for four, 
six, and even eight days and nights. Such burners are used at some twenty 
places on our eastern and western coasts and on the lakes. The use of gas 
as an illuminant has been duly considered and attempted by the board, but 
it can hardly be said to have passed beyond the point where there is not some- 
thing more to be desired. And much the same may be said oi the employment 
of electricity as an agent of illumination It was under the Board's supervision, 
however, that the erreat tower at Hell-Gate in East River, at New York city, 
was lighted ; * that the buoys in Gedney's Channel (New York) and the station 
at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, with the workshops and offices of the board in 
New York Harbor, were lighted : so that the Establishment is to be ready for 
any work in placing electric lights in its towers or ships it authorized to do so 
by Congress. 

It remains to add that the Lighthouse Board is a segment of the United 
States Treasury Department, with headquarters at Washington, I). C. By the 
organic act of August 31, 1852, the Board is composed of two officers of the 
Navy of high rank, two officers of the Corps of Engineers of the United States 
Army, two civilians of high scientific attainments, whose services may be at the 
disposal of the President, and an officer of the Navy, with an officer of the Engi- 
neers of the Army as secretaries, the Secretary of the Treasury being ex-officio 
president. The Board meets regularly four times each year, but called meetings 
are held about once in two weeks. For administrative purposes, the whole country 
is divided into sixteen districts, each having its inspector, a United States naval 
officer, and its engineer from the United States Army. fune 30, 1891, in these 
sixteen districts, 852 light stations were in actual operation, manned by 1082 
keepers, whose average salary, fixed by law, was $600 per annum. 

I he theory of coast lighting is that every coast shall be set with towers, and 
that the rays from their lights shall meet anil pass each other, so that a vessel 
on the coast shall never be out of sight of a light, and that there shall be no 
dark spaces between lights. Upon this theory the United States Government 

* Ultimately taken away because its brightness dazzled the eyes of pilots navigating steam 
and other \essels. 



53 



THE STORY OR AMI-.KICA. 



records of its work 
a peculiar subj 
w hi ch h 
is alsoachn 
ofthesame 

s o m <■ 
which 



proceeds, planting lights where they are most needed upon those lines. From 
year to year the length of the dark spaces on its coasts is lessened or expunged 
entirely, and the day will come, it is predicted, when all its coasts will lie defined 
from end to end by a band of light at night and by well-marked beacons by 
day. 

Toward the realization of this theory the United States of America spent 
in the support and extension of its lighthouse system, in the one hundred years 
from [79] to 1 890, inclusive-, the enormous sum of $93,238,925.80. In the office 
of the Lighthouse Hoard at Washington are preserved, bound in some eight 
hundred volumes of from five hundred to one thousand pages each, the MSS. 

Board has made them available by 

k, in cases and drawers 

400,000 cards. There 

•logical personal index 

matter, running through 

thirty-four volumes, in 

there arc;, say, 300,000 

entries. 

The aggregate 

of this expenditure 

of money and labor 

is appalling by its 

vastness. But he is 

not a wise man, nor 

does he rightly 

esteem the 

value of the 

human life that 

is mack; surer 

and sater by 

such outlay, who will say that the expenditure ought to have been less liberal — 

who would rest content with anything less of efficiency attained or of honor 

accruing to the nation by reason of the facts that have been before us. 

The same recognition and praise will be bestowed, by any wise person 
familiar with it, upon the Untied States Life-Saving Service. This system has 
been widely exploited since it was established upon its present basis by 
,1.1 of Congress in 1S7S. It is an expensive and elaborate- system, but amply 
justifies its existence and administration. This would be true indeed if the; 
value of its protection to human life, which is beyond computation, were left 
out of sight, for, in the words of its ( reneral Superintendent, it has already "saved 
many times its cost in property alone." 




DRILL AND EXERCISE IN I Ml SI R] B0A1 



UNITED STATUS LIFE-SAVING SERVICE. 533 

From its two hundred and thirty-six stations ( fune 30, [891),* it has long 
fulfilled the functions usually allotted to several different organizations. Since 
the introduction of the present system in 1S71, to the (lose oi the fiscal year 
ending fune 30, 1 891 , the number oi disasters in the scope oi the Service has been 
(1892) 5943; value of property involved, $96,357,934 ; value oi property saved, 
$71,646,982; value of property lost, $24,71 1,002 ; number ol persons involved, 
49,874; number of lives lost, 600 ; persons succored at stations, 9,242; days' 
succor afforded, 34,229. 

In its personnel are to be found something over sixteen hundred keepers 
and surfmen — usually six or seven men with a Keeper, at every station. t 
These crews are made up of able-bodied and experienced watermen, all his 
subordinates being chosen by the Keeper oi each station from among those 
residing in its vicinity. There is a need for mutual confidence between the 
leader and his followers, and such selection has been found the best way for 
securing it. The men at their original entry into the Service — every "active 
season" continuing from September t st oi one year to May 1st of the next — 
must be not over fifty-five years of age, and sound in body, being subject to rigid 
physical examination by a surgeon of the United States Marine; I [ospital Service. 
Their compensation is $50 per month during the season, and three dollars 
for each occasion of serving at other times. The salary usually paid to 
Keepers is $700 per annum. They are obliged to reside constantly at 
their stations, have the care and custody of the station property, and gov 
em the station premises. They are also the captains of the crews, who lead 
them and share their perils on all occasions of rescue, taking always the 
steering-oar when the boats are used, and directing all operations with 
the apparatus. The Keepers are, besides, ex-officio United States Inspei tors 
of Customs. In 1882 Congress provided by law that the selection of 
keepers and crews should be made solely with reference to their fitness and 
without regard to political affiliations. At the same time the same whole 
some provision against this pestiferous bane of efficiency in public business 
was extended to the higher officers in the administrative department of the 
Service. 

These methods for manning the stations have, since that date, filled them 
with the pick and flower of the hardy race of beachmen who inhabit our shores. 
No better evidence of this can be desired than that during the years in which 
they have governed the selection of the men not one has shown the white 
feather, while the pages of the Annual Reports of the Service are crowded 

* On the Atlantic coast, 178; on the lakes, 46; on the Pacific, 11 ; at the Falls of the Ohio, 
Louisville, Ky., 1. 

fThe number of men composing the crew of a life-saving station is determined by the 
numbei of oars required to pull the largest boat belonging to it. 



534 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



with the records of gallant deeds that have made them famous throughout 
the land. 

At the opening of the "active season " * the men assemble at their respec- 
tive stations, and establish themselves for a residence of eight months. They 
arrange for their housekeeping, usually by forming a mess, taking turns by 
weeks in catering and cooking, although at some of the stations they engage 
board of the Keeper at a rate approved by the General Superintendent. The 
Keeper organizes his crew by arranging and numbering them in their supposed 
order of merit, the most competent and trustworthy being designated as No. i, 
the next No. 2, and so on. The rank of his men being fixed, the Keeper 
assigns to each his quarters, and prepares bills for the day-watch, night-patrol, 




OFF TO A WRECK. 



boat and apparatus-drill, care of the premises, etc. On the ocean beaches, the 
stations are generally situated among the low sand hills common to such local- 
ities, sufficiently back of high-water mark to be safe from the reach of storm- 
tides. They are plain structures, designed to serve as barracks for the crews 
and to afford convenient storage for the boats and apparatus. All are built of 
wood, but with a view to withstand the severest tempests. Those located, as 
many necessarily are, where they are liable to be undermined, or swept from 
their position by storms or tidal waves, are so strongly put together that they 
may be overthrown and sustain but trilling injury. Instances are on record 
while they have been carried a long distance inland, in one case a half mile. 



*" Organization and Methods of the United States Life-Saving Service," p. 14. 



NIGHT-SER I ICE. 5 3 5 

without sustaining' material damage. Their substantial construction also enables 
them to be easily and cheaply transported if anything demand their removal.* 

For the purposes of watch and patrol, limits are established as far as possi- 
ble along the coast in both directions from the stations, these limits being 
marked by distant monuments. Day-watch is kept from sunrise to sunset by a 
surfman assigned to this duty every twenty-four hours. He is usually 
stationed in the look-out on the top of the building, where there is a flag-staff 
for signaling, the service co-operating in this matter with the maritime associa- 
tions of the country, and if the patrol limits cannot be seen from thence, he goes, 
at least three times a day, far enough along the shore to bring them into view. 
During thick and stormy weather a complete patrol, like that at night, is main- 
tained. And the day-watch keeps a record of all passing vessels. 

For patrol service the night is divided into tour watches, one from sunset 
to S p. M., one from 8 p. m. to 12 a. m., one from 1 2 to 4 a. m., and one from 
4 a. m. to sunrise. Two surfmen are designated for each watch. When the 
hour for their patrol arrives, they set out in opposite directions along the coast, 
keeping as near as practicable to the shore, as far as the ends of their respective 
beats. If within communicating distance from an adjacent station, each patrol- 
man proceeds until he meets another from the next station, and gives him a 
metallic check marked with his station and crew number, receiving a similar 
check in exchange. The checks thus collected are examined by the Keeper, 
re'corded in the journal, and returned to their proper stations the next night. If 
a patrolman fails to meet his fellow from the adjacent station, after waiting a 
reasonable time at the usual place of meeting, he continues his journey until 
he either meets him or reaches that station and ascertains the cause of the 
failure, which on his return he reports to his own Keeper, who makes a record 
of it in his journal.-)- At isolated stations each patrolman is required to carry a 
clock, within which is fixed a dial that can be marked only by means of a key, 
which also registers the time of marking. This key is secured to a post at the 
end of his beat, and he is required to reach it and bring back the dial properly 
marked. 

Every night-patrolman is equipped with a beach-lantern and several red 
Coston hand-lights. Upon the discovery of a wreck, a vessel in distress, or 
one running dangerously near the shore, he ignites his hand-light by percussion, 
which sends out a brilliant red name. This serves the double purpose of 
warning the people on the vessel of their clanger, and of assuring them of 
succor if they are already in distress. 

* A complete life-saving station, fully equipped, costs about ^000. 

7 A transcript of each Keeper's daily journal, " log," is forwarded each week to the General 
Superintendent at Washington, through the District Superintendent. 



536 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



For every day in the week a regular routine of duties is appointed for the 
surfmen, and if anything prevents the performance of any of these duties the fact 
must be entered on the station "log," or journal, with a full explanation, and 
the omitted exercise must be performed at the first opportunity. For practice 
with the beach-apparatus (hereafter to be described), there is provided, near 
each station, a suitable drill-ground, prepared by erecting a spar called a 
" wreck-pole," to represent the mast of a stranded vessel, seventy-five yards 
distant (over the water, if possible) from the place where the men operate — 
which represents the shore. At drill the crew is mustered in the boat-room at 
the station, and each man, upon his number being called, salutes the command- 
ing officer and recites in proper sequence every act he is to perform in the exer- 




LAl'NrHIN'n THE 



cise, as prescribed in the Service Manual. At the proper word of command 
they all fall into their allotted places at the drag-ropes of the apparatus-cart and 
draw it to the drill-ground, where they perform the remainder of the exercise, 
which consists in effecting a mimic rescue by r rigging the gear and taking a man 
ashore from the wreck-pole in the breeches-buoy. The officer conducting the 
drill carefully notes the time which elapses from the moment he gives the initial 
command, "Action ! " until the rescued man sets foot upon the shore. 

If in one month after the opening of the "active season" a crew cannot 
accomplish the rescue within five minutes, it is considered that they have 
been remiss in drilling or that there are some stupid men among them, and 
they are cautioned that if upon the next visit of the inspector a marked 
improvement is not shown, some decisive action will be taken to secure it. 



LIFE-SAVING APPLIANCES. 537 

This usually produces the desired effect. The exercise has been executed, 
without error, by several crews, in two minutes and thirty seconds ; and at 
some of the night drills, without lights other than the moon and stars, the 
shot has been fired, the apparatus set up, and a man brought ashore from 
the wreck-pole in three minutes. 

The appliances to be found at every life-saving station are the tools with 
which each group of surfmen do their appropriate and best work for the Service 
and for their fellow-men. They are : two boats, with outfit, a life-car, two sets of 
the breeches buoy, a Lyle life-gun, cork jackets, heaving sticks, night signals, 
rockets, signal flags, barometer, thermometer, apparatus-cart, etc. The means 
employed to rescue people from stranded vessels are everywhere essentially 
the same and are two in number, the crossing of tumultuous waters between 
the wreck and the shore in a life-boat rowed by the saving crew, or the spanning 
of the waters by strong lines between the vessel and the shore, over which some 
vehicle for rescue is passed back and forth. The type of boat generally 
employed for the former purpose by our Service, and always by preference over 
the spanning process, if it be possible, for the rescue by boat is quicker, is 
known as a surf- rather than a life-boat, and there are three varieties in use, the 
Beebe, the Higgins, & Giflord and the Beebe-McLellan. They are made 
from white cedar, with white oak frames, 25 to 27 feet long, 6)/ 2 to 7 feet beam, 
2 feet 3 inches to 2 feet 6 inches deep amidships, and 1 foot 7 inches to 2 feet 1 
inch sheer of gunwale. Their bottoms are flat, with little or no keel, and have 
a camber (upward curve) of 1 '^ inches in eight feet each side of the midship 
section. They draw only six or seven inches of water when light, and weigh 
from 700 to 1000 pounds. They commonly have air-cases at the ends and 
along the interior sides, under the thwarts, which make them insubmergible, and 
are fitted with cork fenders running along their outsides to protect them against 
collision with hulls or other wreckage. Loops of rope, with floats, are 
affixed to their outer sides, to which persons in the water may cling. They are 
propelled by six oars and can carry, besides their crews, from ten to twelve per- 
sons, although as many as fifteen have been landed at a time in a bad sea. 
Their cost ranges from $210 to $275. The Beebe-McLellan boat is the Beebe 
boat with a self-bailing quality incorporated. ;|: The boats are so light as to be 
readily transported along the shores of soft, yielding sand, without roads, and 
along the flat beaches covered with little depth of water for a considerable dis- 
tance seaward, which almost uniformly mark our Atlantic coast from Cape Cod 
to Cape Fear. 

The marvelous self-righting and self-bailing English life-boats are also 
employed in our Life-Saving Service wherever the coast formation calls for 
them, thirty-seven being in its ownership and use in November, iSSg. 



* And recently the self-righting quality, as well. 



5 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



In active service with the surf-boat, the Keeper steers with a long oar, and, 
with the aid of his trained surfmen, intent upon his every look and command, 
manoeuvres his buoyant craft through the surf with masterly skill. He is 
usually able to avoid a direct encounter with the heaviest breakers, but if he 
is obliged to meet their onset, meets them directly, "head on." His practiced 
hand immediately perceives any excess of weight thrown against either bow. 
and instantly counteracts its force with his oar as instinctively and unerringly as 
the skilled musician presses the proper key of his instru- 
ment. He thus keeps his boat from broaching to, and 
avoids a threatened capsize. At such a time the Ameri- 
can boat shows itself capable of marvelous action ; and 
"few sights," says Mr. O'Connor, former Assistant 
Superintendent of the Service, "are more impressive 
than the passage out through the flashing breakers of 
the frail red boat, lightly swimming on the vast swell 
of the surge, held in suspension before the roaring and 
tumultuous comber, or darting forward as the wall of 
water breaks and crumbles, obedient to the oars of the 
impassive crew." 

The requirement of the Service is, in all cases of 
stranded vessels, that a trial of rescue by the surf- or 
life-boat be made if that be practicable ; and no Keeper 
is held excusable for failure to make effort to save the 
shipwrecked by that means, unless the launching of the 
boat would obviously be foolhardy or is clearly un- 
necessary. In those cases, and they are not infrequent, 
the beach-apparatus is brought into play. 

First, a projectile, to which is attached a line about 
a quarter of an inch in diameter and very strong, is fired 
toward the vessel from the Lyle gun.* If this reaches 
its mark and the line drops on the vessel, it is seized 
by the imperiled sailers and hauled on board until they 
find attached to its shore-end an endless, longer, and 
larger line, called "the whip," running through a pulley, to which whip-line is 
fastened a board, with directions printed upon it in English and in French, for 
the adjustment of the whip on board the vessel. The whip-line pulley-block, 
having come aboard, is made fast by the sailors, well up on the mast, if that 
be possible, in accordance with the instructions referred to. 




TALLY BOARD AND WHIP BLOCK. 



*A small bronze cannon, which, with its line-carrying projectile, weighs but about 200 lbs. 
It was invented by Captain D. A. Lyle, of the Ordnance Corps of the United States Army. Its 
range is 695 yards. 



RESUSCITATION. 53.9 

Already, on shore, one end ot a three-inch hawser has been made fast 
to a sand-anchor, and the anchor has been buried in a hole which the life- 
savers who are not at the gun have dug, and that part of the hawser next 
this anchored end has been lifted over a standing tripod or crotch, to raise 
it high above the earth. The other end of the hawser is now affixed to the 
whip-line, and forthwith hauled to the vessel by that by those on board of it. 
They find upon the hawser another instruction that they fasten their end of 
that to the mast, say, eighteen inches higher up than the block or pulley of 
the whip-line. This done, the sailors or others on the stranded craft have 
nothing more to do except to be rescued. At once, on shore, the breeches 
buoy or life-car (if the latter be used) is swung to the hawser by its own 
pulley for a "traveler;" the life-savers forthwith haul on the whip and pull 
the buoy or car, suspended as we have seen, and fastened to the whip, out to 
the wreck ; then the shore crew pull again upon the whip, this time in the 
reverse direction, and the buoy or car comes back to them with its human 
freight, bringing to safety, on each trip, one or two persons in the buoy, or 
six to eight within the car. 

The shipwrecked people, once on shore, are taken to the life-saving station 
and are provided with every comfort it affords. They find hot coffee and dry 
clothing* awaiting them, with cots for those who need rest and sleep. If any 
are sick or maimed they are nursed and cared for until sufficiently recovered 
to leave with safety ; in the meantime, medical aid is called if practicable.f 
There is also at each station a very fair library of books, presented by the 
American Seamen's Friend Society of New York city and by benevolent indi- 
viduals, serving the purpose of entertainment for the life-saving crew and of 
relief from the tedium of enforced detention on the part of those who have been 
rescued. 

At times, moreover, the unfortunate people reach the shore to all appear- 
ances dead. In such cases the Keepers and surfmen attempt their resuscita- 
tion by the most approved scientific methods, employing the Hall-Silvester 
treatment for restoring respiration, for which they have printed instructions and 
in which they have been thoroughly drilled. During a given twelve years of 
the service, of one hundred and eighteen apparently drowned persons thus dealt 
with, sixty were successfully and fifty-eight unsuccessfully treated. 

The United States Life-Saving Service is attached to the United States 
Treasury Department. Its chief officer is its General Superintendent, and 

* The clothing is taken from a supply constantly kept on hand by the Woman's National 
Relief Association, an organization established to afford relief to sufferers from disasters of 
every kind. 

fA medicine chest is furnished for each station, with wine and brandy, mustard plasters, 
volatile salts, probangs, and a few other simple remedies and appliances. 



54Q 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



since its formal organization in June, 187S, it has had no other than Mr. 
Sumner I. Kimball, who had taken charge of the United States Revenue 
Marine Service in February, 1871, and with that charge assumed the care of 
the few scattered life-saving stations then existing. He was already known 
(1878) as the virtual founder of the life-saving system then legally established. 

His name was at once nominated to the 
United States Senate by President Hayes, 
and he was promptly and unanimously 
confirmed by that body without reference. 
The law places no limit upon the tenure 
of this officer, and he is, therefore, subject 
to the pleasure of the President. His 
office is in Washington, D. C, with an 
Assistant General Superintendent, their 
respective salaries being $4000 and $2500 
per annum. Connected with the office 
is a corps of clerks, a civil engineer, 
topographer, hydrographer, and draughts- 
man. Then follows a Board of Experts 
on Life-saving Appliances, an Inspector, 
with headquarters in New York, and an 
Assistant there as well. These are supple- 
mented by an Assistant Inspector for each 
of the twelve districts into which the entire 
ocean and lake coasts of the country are 
divided, who is detailed from the United 
States Revenue Cutter Service, and in 
addition a Superintendent of each of 
these districts. These latter conduct the 
general business of the districts, visit the 
stations, make requisitions tor supplies 
and see that they are furnished, pay off 
the crews, etc. Their compensation is 
$1000 to $1800 per annum. 

The noble Service which has held 
our attention fairly merits all the space 
given it by way of record. For it marks as plainly, and perhaps upon a 
wider scale than most of its companion instruments, the existing spirit and 
purpose of our countrymen in this matter of saving human life. That is its 
main mission. Regulation No. 112 of the Service reads: — 




THE liREKCHES HUOV. 



''On boarding wrecks by boat, the preservation of life will be the Keeper's first considera- 



PREVENTION OF COL US IONS AT SEA. 54 1 

tion (or that of the person in charge of the boat for the time being), and he will on no account 
take in goods or merchandise which may endanger the safety of his boat and the lives of those 
entrusted to his charge: and should anything of the kind be put in against his remonstrance, he 
is fully authorized to throw it overboard." 

And behind all that has been said of the Service and its personnel, one finds 
the American people making their work a possibility as every year goes by. 

One of the beneficent legislative enactments for which the Service was 
very largely indebted to the late Honorable Samuel Sullivan Cox, M. C. 
from New York City, was the quasi pension system for its crews adopted 
by the United States Congress in 1882. The bill which was then passed 
provides that the pay of any member of a crew losing his life in the line 
of duty shall be continued to his wife and children for the term of two years, 
and that a member disabled in the line of duty shall be retained upon the 
pay-roll one year, and, under certain circumstances, two years. 

Passing from a survey of these two great systems — the lighthouse and the 
life-saving — in further statement of the means now employed by our country- 
men to protect human life, it is in point to instance the Regulations for the Pre- 
vention of Collisions at Sea by night-signals. These are to be indicated as fixed 
upon by the International Marine Conference, held at Washington, I). C, 
October-December, 1889. Delegates were present and were participants from 
these countries : Austria-Hungary, Belgium, China, Chili, Denmark, France, 
Germany, Great Britain, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Neth- 
erlands, Norway, Russia, Siam, Spain, Sweden, the United States of America, 
and Venezuela, South America. Citation is had from the "Official Record of 
the Proceedings of the Conference," by reference and condensation, as follows : — 

Following certain preliminaries, Article 1 of the " Rules" provides that they are to be com- 
plied with in all weathers, and that when these are used no others shall be employed. Article 
2 fixes the position of a white light to be burned upon the forepart of the vessel, of agreen light 
upon its starboard side, and a red light to port, all to be fitted with inboard screens, and adds 
that a steam vessel may carry an additional light similar to the first named, the two to be placed 
in line with the keel. 

Article 3 prescribes, in detail, the character of the lights to be carried by a steam vessel when 
towing another vessel. 

Article 4 relates to the case of a vessel which, from any accident, is not under command, and 
prescribes its lights, as also that of a vessel employed in laying or picking up a telegraph eal>le. 

Article 5 prescribes that a sailing vessel under way, and any vessel being towed, shall carry 
the same lights as named in Article 2 for a steam vessel, with the exception that they shall never 
carry white lights. 

Articles 6 and 7 pertain to the use of portable lights by small vessels in certain cases, and make 
certain allowances to steam vessels of less than forty, and to vessels under oars or sails of less than 
twenty tons, gross tonnage, respectively. 

Articles 8 and 9 fix the character of lights fir pilot vessels and for fishing vessels and boats 
under wav. 



542 



THE ST0R1 OF AM F.RICA. 



Articles 10, 11. i 2, i ;, i i relate to lights to be displayed by a vessel which is being overtaken 
b) another; to that to be shown by a vessel under 150 feet in length, lying at anchor; to the 
employment by vessels, in addition to prescribed lights, of flare-up lights, or detonating sig- 
nals; guard against the interference ol these rules with rules made by any Government tor deter- 
mining the lights to be used on its war-vessels or upon those under convoy, etc., and presenile. 
in conclusion, what signal shall be carried in daytime forward by a steam vessel proceeding iiiuler 
sail only. 

There is an impression of detail in these regulations, even when presented 

in greatly abbreviated form, 
which may be almost, if not 
quite, burdensome to a 
general reader. But they 
attest in a very striking 
manner and degree the pur- 
pose of the Conference dele- 
gates, experts in all sea- 
matters, and from so many 
nations of the earth, to in- 
corporate within them any 
and everything that may 
tend to make human life 
safer on the deep, and aptly 
fall within the scope of these 
pages. 

Further and most vivid 
impression, alike oi the fact 
and the extent of care now 
exercised in our country for 
the saving of human life, is 
to be derived from municipal 
regulations concerning it in 
our large cities. Assuredly 
Sanitary Science has not yet 
reached within them its am- 
plest development, but those seeking familiarity with its present aspects may 
be commended to the last printed report of the Board of Health oi the 
I lealth 1 >epartment of the city of New York — that for the year ending 
December 31, [890. A score of years, possibly, even ten years ago, its 
issuance would have been impossible. 

During the year named the city's death rate was lowered from 25.06 per 
thousand, in [889, to 24.58, and there was a marked gain to infant life, secured 
i'\ constanl and systematic sanitary inspection under the Board's direction. 1 he 




IP1 K \ 1 lov •• HAl'l. AWAY. 



THE AMBULANCE SYSTEM. 543 

work .lone by its "Summer Corps" of Inspectors contributed effectively to this 
result. The percentageof deaths anion- children of five years old and under, 
to the whole number of deaths in the city was 40, against a similar percentage 
of 48.35 in the year [875. Diminution in the ravages of scarlet lexer following 
the work of the I lealth Board was marked. The number of cases of diphtheria 
also exhibited kindred diminution. 

Permanent Inspectors of Vaccination, working mainly anion- scholars 
in the public schools, brought about the fact that between fune 14, 1889, 
and December 31, 1890, not a single case of small-pox occurred in New 
York from contagion acquired in the city itself. A corps of Inspectors visited 
every dwelling where contagious disease- was reported, fumigated and 
disinfected it, and then left other disinfectants with succinct instructions for 
their use when necessary. In twenty five districts, which covered the city area, 
as many Inspectors reported to the Board upon special places likely to become 
dangerous to life or detrimental to health. These Inspectors made 39 
visits, which resulted in more than 9000 orders for the abatement of nuisances 
of seventy-one different kinds. Special Sanitary Police made 85,023 inspec 
tions of tenement houses during the year, and, on behalf of the more than one 
million people resident therein, the Report declares that such surveillance so 
improved these- houses that their changed condition constituted one of the 
most important subjects before the Board of Health for years. Inspections 
of fruit and food numbered more than 35,000; meat and fish condemned and 
destroyed by the Health Inspectors amounted to over 12,000,000 pounds; 
fruit and food similarly treated aggregated over 1,000,000 pounds. Careful 
weekly analysis of the city's Croton water was also made by the Health 
Hoard's chemist, to detect all impurities within it at all likely to injure the 
public health." 

The . Xmbulance System connected with public hospitals, parks, etc., in New 
York, and in other American cities, merits our attention. Historically it is a 
military system, and in military understanding ambulances are hospital establish 
ments, moving with armies in the field, organized to provide early surgical 
assistance to the wounded alter battles. It would be aside from the purpose 
of nur volume to essay an enumeration of the elaborate details of such an 
organization, but it may be observed that while the system, as a branch of 
military apparatus, had very notable development in the United States in the 
civil war of 1861-65, and as it was then perfected has since been adopted by 
most civilized nations, the term " ambulance " is now ordinarly used, in this 
country, to designate a small spring wagon drawn by one or two horses, 
and provided with all necessary appliances for transporting sick or injured 



These operations of the Hoard were carried on at an expenditure of $392,436,25. 



544 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



persons. Ambulance staffs attached to hospitals in some oi our cities consist 
ol uniformi 'I surgeons and drivers. More or less detailed rules are provided al 
Bellevue Hospital, in New York City, 1 " for their guidance. It is, in part, the 
surgeon's dutj to see thai ili<- ambulance is provided wiih everything for the 
reliel oi .1 sufferer. When answering a summons from a police precinct, a prison, 
a fire, or anj casualty, the Ambulance has the righl <>l way after the United 
States in. 11I and the City Fire Department. Gentleness and kindness are 
espe< i.ilK enjoined in the handling <>l patients, and in all respects the presence 

oi siderate and intelligeni disposition carefully i<> heir the injured or the si< I. 

to quarters where they are to receive needful treatment, is discernible in their 
regulations, in order to the greater sei urity "I human life. 




1 .' ;i 1 \ 1 . 



The same regard is manifesl in the existence, in most American cities and 
large towns, of Building Laws, oi greater or less efficiency, with the design <>l 
rendering dwellings and other structures more stable and healthful. 'That there 
may be a call in given localities for simplifying and for otherwise amending 
such legislation, ought not to obscure the truth that its enactment, and its 
enforcement as il .land., is in virtue "I a distincl intention to protect the lives 
1 it all w lii ' beci >me their inhal litants, 

The treatment of this topii maj I"' closed by reference i<> the increased 
.hi sea and land which characterizes the working <>l die railwa) 



: \i fool ol ">i h Street, on ] lasl River. 



,:^», 




I III i . v i .1 I in \MKRICAN KALI I • ' < ll'.l 



546 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and steamboat systems owned and used by our fellow-citizens. Whatever 
impressions may have been entertained, the well-ascertained facts prove that this 
increase is more than real — is such as justly calls for recognition and for hearty 
praise of the genius that has given rise to it and the administrative ability that 
insures its continuance. In the matter of Atlantic Ocean steamships, the com- 
paratively recent adoption of the twin screw, the provision of double ship 
bottoms, the new materials employed in constructing vessels and their equip- 
ments, the use of " steam lanes " (the running of these steamers upon pre- 
scribed and definite courses that are based on calculations as to probable areas 
of fog and ice) — these and similar expedients, springing, doubtless to some 
extent, from keen rivalry between the various lines, do yet give unmistakable 
evidence of determination on the part of these navigation companies to leave 
nothing undone in the construction and managing of their vessels which may in 
any way be the means of averting disaster. 

And if the question be as to safety in railway travel within the United 
States, the answer must be the same ; the facts bear swift witness to its exist- 
ence, whatever the motive that gives birth to it. 

Thus, from lighthouse and light-saving systems, from ocean lights and civic 
hygienic processes, from ambulance organization, and out of a regard to secur- 
ity in the erection of buildings, the theory of which, at least, American people 
have really grasped, as well as from the facts of ocean and railway travel, 
comes to clear view the deliberate and persevering purpose of that people to 
guard human life, which by its genesis and in its execution may be taken as the 
guaranty of still further development in the same direction. 




CHAPTER XXX. 

FROM CAVE TO PALACE. 

HAT man in his savage state lived in caves and holes in the 
ground is a very simple statement of a well-known fact, yet to 
most of us it carries a suggestively Robinson Crusoeish flavor 
that is not unpleasant. The fact is that the aboriginal ancestor 
sometimes asserts himself in a great desire to get away from 
the walls of brick and the roofs of tin and shingle, and fly, not 
only far from the madding crowd, but also far from the steam 
radiator and the electric light, and the things they imply and the things they 
involve, to a cave or a hole in some rocky hillside. 

Picture such a dwelling ! A cavern pillared with stalactites, musical with 
the plash of falling water, brilliant with the flashing colors of millions of crystals 
that reflect the blaze of torch or fire. A pile of warm furs for a bed, the larder 
stocked from lake and forest, that is the sort of a primitive dwelling that one- 
would glory in for — well, say a two weeks' vacation. From the rocky doorway 
of such a retreat the entrancing view of lake, forest, and mountain would 
doubtless fill the measure of aesthetic enjoyment. Fortunately, we are not 
obliged to realize all our dreams. 

THE REAL THING. 

The far-away savage, to whom cavern life was not a choice, but a necessity, 
might open his eyes at such a picture. In the wilds of our still unreclaimed 
domain there are dreary, dark caves in the mountains that are only visited by 
the fox, the panther, or the mountain lion. The Indian shuns them with a 
superstitious dread, for they are full of dead men's bones. Over them the 
solemn pines grow in unvarying monotony. For centuries, perhaps, they have 
been used as burial-places, and before that they were the abodes of the living, 
shelters that man had wrested from the wild beasts and held by the right of a 
scarcely superior intelligence, sharing them with the bat, the owl, and the snake. 
His lair was furnished as when the former tenant occupied it, with a pile of 
leaves as a nest for himself and his mate and their young ; or, perhaps, the pelt 
of his predecessor, feline and odorous, added luxury to the den. A pile of 

547 



54 8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



brush or a few stones in the doorway kept out intruders, and when the growling 
master ol this castle sallied forth, urged by hunger or curiosity, he armed him- 
self with .1 weapon of stone which he had spent days in fashioning. If success- 
ful in the chase, he returned to share with his whelps and their dam the fruits of 
his prowess, till they had gorged themselves and slept by the hones of their 

feast. 

1 le saw, perhaps, the accumulation of the glacier and its slow subsidence, 
and learned in the suffering of that long winter to make his cavern more secure 
against the penetrating cold. 

Across the mouth n( his retreat he built rough walls of stone, rudely 
laying them in courses. ["hen, after awhile, discovering the astonishing fact 
that caves could lie made, his children, and their offspring in turn, added to the 

achievements ol their ances- 
Still retaining the 
mountain crevice or 
the shelter ot an over- 
hanging rock 
as a basis, 
they supple 
mented these 
with fronts ami 

sides. even 

learning to en- 
•ge the space 
within by building 
out upon the ledge 
in trout. Some 
crude dwellings 
erected by Euro- 
peans, illustrate the slow advance in architecture in civilized times. 

Another step, a few generations, perhaps, and within the recessed wall 
of the rock appeared the village of curious masonry, its houses huddled 
together in the shadow like the cells of a wasp's house or the nests ot the 
sparrow. 

When you are traveling, go some day down the Canon de Chelly, in New 
Mexico : follow its course as it winds in and out. back and forth, among the 
sage and chaparal, through the yellow masses ot the sunflowers. As you 
approach the canon wall look up. 1 lung between heaven and earth, in the grip 
of the rock, you will see caught such little habitations as we have described — yes. 
and in the " Monumental Canon " and "del Muerto," and in many another ot 
the fastnesses of that curious region, are others, some high up, some at the base 




SPANISH H0US1 IN UOURBON STREET, NEW VORK. 



THE MUMMY CAVE, 549 

of the mesa, trim little castles that time has battlemented and the whirling floods 
ill centuries have bombarded and broken. 

When the cave-dweller had reached this point in his development, the 

interior of his house began to show evidences of his advance, as well as the 
outside. The walls were roughly plastered ; sometimes decoration in colors, as 
a simple frieze, was added. The requirements of his table, too, wen some 
what greater, and his aerie contained a granary or storehouse, entered by means 
of a ladder and a hole in the wall. 

We do not know why the cliff-dwellers copied the swallows in their habi- 
tations. It may have been lor protection against enemies, or lor fear ol the 
(loods. What the conditions of the valleys of .Arizona, New Mexico, and 
Colorado were at that time, or what, the occupation of those who inhabited 
them, is a mystery. It is probable that at first tin- streams were much higher, 
and that year by year " the bottom has dropped out" of the canons, till now 
the distance to the dwellings is often hundreds of feet. Nor is there any evi 
dence of essential difference between the little stone houses that are perched 
on high ami those that arc- on a level with the valley, except that the higher 
oik's are generally in better preservation, though very likely older than the 

others. 

I ill MUMMY CAVE. 

Perhaps the largest group of cave or clili dwellings known to man is that 
of the Canon del Muerto, in Arizona, discovered by Stevenson. lie named it 
"The Mummy Cave," having found near it an undisturbed tomb containing a 
mummy. There is a roughly-defined bay in the wall, a great concave surface 
traversed by a ledge some two hundred feet from the bottom. In the centre is 
the oven like mouth of a cavern, within and around the mouth of which clus- 
ter houses, which, it is estimated, may have sheltered a thousand souls. Much 
of the terrace, with the houses that projected upon it, now lie heaped in con- 
fusion at the foot of the cliff. 

F. T. Bickford, who visited this remarkable group of buildings a year after 
its discovery, says : — 

"The evidence of an aristocracy or controlling i lass is here very striking. The cave is shaped 
like two irregular crescents joined end to end, and the apartments, orrather cells, of the two portions 
are small and of irregular form, following the conformation of the rork. At the point of jum tion, 
however, covering almost entirely the narrower shelf, there stands a re< tangular tower, three storie \ 
in height, the rooms of which, as well as those in its immediate neighborhood, are larger and the 
walls and floors much better in construction than those upon either side. The tower commands 
the village, as feudal town, were commanded l>v the castles of their lords. 

Tanks and other necessaries of such a town are also described. The same 
author adds : — 

"The inner coating ... is of common (lay, and was apparently put on by tin- late occu- 



55o 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



pants of the village. Where this has peeled off a highly ornamental earlier coating of the interior 
is disclosed. It was frescoed in geometrical figures of brownish-red, white, and yellow, and the 
workmanship is such as would not be discreditable to our modern artisans." 

Scattered throughout the same region are other ruins, standing alone, 
removed from the canon cliffs. These are in all essential respects like the 
" Pueblos," or community Indian towns still inhabited in New Mexico. Their 
material is stone, which is often laid in courses, regularly arranged in an alternat- 
ing pattern. The Pueblo Indians build their houses in clusters, tier above tier, 
house over house, reaching the upper terraces by means of ladders and using 
their neighbors' roofs for courts and balconies. 

Long ago, when the Mexican conquerors were still exploring the new land 

and Spanish 
priest and sol- 
dier vied with 
each other in 
discovering 
marvels, an 
astonishing tale 
came down 
from the Xorth, 
transmitted 
through Indian 
and priest. It 
was an account 
of seven cities 
— the golden 
cities of Cibola. 
T h e y were 
w onderful, 
walled cities, if the report spoke true. The adventurous Coronado, * at 
the head of an expedition, set out in search of them, and although he did 
not secure the gold, he left an account of the cities which he found. They 
were walled, truly, and well-nigh impregnable, if one can judge from that 
record. What became of them ? Years afterward, in our own time, in fact, 
Lieutenant (now General) Bandelier followed in the footsteps of Coronado, and 

* Coronado (Francisco Vasquez de) was one of the early explorers of New Mexico and Florida, 
1536-39. An adventurous Spaniard, he visited Lower California and what is now Texas, and there 
it was he discovered the seven famous cities mentioned by Cabeca de Vaca. On his return from an 
unsuccessful expedition to the Pacific coast, in 1542, he fell from his horse at Tiquez, near the 
Rio Grande, "and," says his narrator "with the fall fell out his wits and he became mad." From 
that time he disappears from public notice. 




THE INDIAN'S TENT. 551 

after careful search and intelligent comparison he located the seven cities on 
the sites of Zuni, Acoma, Taos, and the Rio Grande settlements. They were 
the dwellings of the Pueblo Indians. But what was the origin of the Pueblos ? 
It has been maintained that theirs is but the remnant of a greater race, and their 
habitations the decadent expression of a more pretentious architecture. 

Wandering peoples have dwelt under temporary shelters that have little in 
common with the permanent habitations of man. Tent, wigwam, or wick-e-up 
serve nearly the same purpose. Collections of them are villages only by 
courtesy. It is difficult to imagine a people growing up to anything like serious 
national life under coverings of canvas or skins that are erected here to-day and 
there to-morrow. They are the makeshifts of the soldier or the hunter. There- 
fore we can afford hardly more than a passing mention of the light lodges of 
the Indian camps. 

From the time America was settled by white men to the present day there 
has been no more change in the general plan of a wigwam than in the nests of 
the orioles. A framework of poles, about which is drawn the covering of skins, 
open at the top to emit the smoke of a fire. More or less picturesque, according 
to the quality of skins used, the size of the structure, the brilliancy of the ochre, 
or the depth of smoke or dirt shading. Liable, like the tent of the Arabs, to 
be folded silently and as silently to steal away. 

If the "wick-e-up" happens to be of branches instead of skins, there are 
some individual features observed, as, for instance, that the boughs are turned 
large end up, so that they will shed the water better ; but there is the same 
opening at the top to let out the smoke and let in the storm — the same lack ot 
serious constructive skill shown. They are makeshifts merely. 

Between camp-making and the rudest attempts at home-making there is 
fixed a great gulf. The most brilliant lodge of an Indian Chief takes a lower 
rank, architecturally, than the most modest sod house on the almost treeless 
plains of the West. There timber is scarce, labor is unskilled, transportation 
difficult. Perhaps the settler may have located where the great wind — which 
sounds even more fierce and terrible if we call it by its Scriptural name, 
Euroclydon — comes sweeping down now and again to evict intruders. In that 
case the sod house is a safe retreat for him. 

He makes his burrow by hollowing a foundation in some little hillock if he 
can find one, framing and lining it as best he can with the material obtainable, 
stone or wood, and covering the whole with sod. In external appearance it is 
but one remove from a root cellar, perhaps, but many a sturdy boy and girl has 
grown up or is growing up in such a home. It is humble, but it is a house, and 
as such it has a definite place in this chapter. 

Superficially the sod house seems to be related to the tumuli of the 
mound builders, but the resemblance is only on the surface. The mounds 



55? 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



which are scattered through the country, but are most plentiful in Ohio and 
the Mississippi Valley, had many purposes, but habitation was not one of 
them. There are some that are identical in shape and probable purpose with 
the "teocalli," or sacrificial mounds, of Mexico, others that were intended for 
irrigation purposes, and a far greater number that were simply burial places ; 
but among them we find none that could have been intended as domiciles for 
the living. Vet the importance of these mounds to the archaeologist can hardly 
be overstated, since by the utensils, glazed ware, bits of carving, and human 
remains hidden in them we can conjecture the stature, brain capacity, advance- 







AX OLD MAY YoKK MANSION. 



ment in art, and even the occupation of a people whose houses, long 
abandoned, have fallen and decayed till the centuries have left no vestige of 
them. 

The sturdy log house, that needed no timbering, or, rather, which was all 
timber, has occupied quite an important place in the development of the West 
and South. It has been the cradle of Presidents, Senators, and other men of 
note. A type too familiar to require an extended description, it has varied but 
little down to the present day. The log cabin is only possible in a timber 
country, where it is cheaper to use a whole log than to saw it into boards or 



THE LOG HOUSE. 



553 



slabs. The over-lapping ends are cut so that they will dovetail at the angles, 
and openings are plastered with clay "to keep the wind away." In the North 
such a house would be banked in winter with sod, to add warmth ; in the South 
it is the custom to raise the structure on piles. This construction allows the 
chickens and pigs to run beneath, and saves out-buildings. 

Many a siege has been 
sustained behind such walls 
in the days when Indians 
were more to be dreaded 
than even cold and hunger 
and wild beasts. The block 
house was at once a dwell- 
ing and a fort. 

The luxurious cottages 
of modern days have fre- 
quently adopted log cabin 
features, adding picturesque- 
ness, if not solid merit, to 
their architecture. 

So far we have con- 
fined ourselves to the primi- 
tive dwellings of men who 
inhabit the wilderness, or at 
least the far - away back- 
country districts. It must 
still be a long way before 
we reach the modern city 
house with its thousand 
conveniences. 

When f o r e s t s w e r < 
cleared and the fields of 
grain or tobacco filled the 
valleys, and the softer side 
of life began to appeal to 
the men who had made the 

wilderness blossom as the rose, they expanded and improved their homes, add- 
ing here a little and there a little, till the evolution of the colonial house was 
accomplished. The peculiarities of that house were due to the demands of the 
climate, the requirements of the mode of life, and the kind and quality of 
material to be obtained. 

The most lamiliar type of country house was the cube ; its lineal des< end 




IN I'ERI'iK. (IF THE 



554 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ants are still with us. A parallelopipedon of wood — clapboards or shingle — 
surmounted by a steep, pitched roof that the snow would not lodge on ; a hall- 
way in the middle, with keeping-room on one side, bed-room on the other, and 
living-room in the rear ; that was the successor ol the log cabin and the tore- 
runner of the colonial mansion. 

The first addition made to this simple structure was the extension of one 
story to serve as milk-room, pantry, etc. Then, perhaps, a smaller build- 
ing, like the first, to which it was connected by a covered passageway. A 
porch, or " stoep," next graced the front of the edifice, and the roof, that had 
expanded and adapted itself to the changing shape of the house, was broken 
by dormers, to give as much space as possible to the low upper story. A 
common form of country house had a short roof in front and a long one to 
cover a half story and extension at the rear. We see this repeated in many a 
cottage of the present day. 

GAMBREL ROOFS. 

Donald G. Mitchell is authority for the opinion that the gambrel roofs, that 
have been lately so much revived, are peculiar to the coast or its neighborhood. 
The quaint double roof-slant, he thinks, may have been suggested roughly by 
the inverted hull of a vessel. This may be true in part, though the Dutch 
variation of this form, which is flatter on top, with the lower sweep longer and 
curving outward toward the bottom, is supposed to have found its suggestion in 
the Old World. Frequently, in old houses still standing on the seaboard, we find 
a balustrade enclosing the upper, flatter portion of the roof, as though it had 
had observatory purposes. It is not impossible that to this use was due some 
of the modifications of the gambrel roof. 

The chimneys of such houses as we have described were no mean affairs. 
Great, generous fire-places sent their flames roaring up flues that might easily 
have admitted the traditional witches that the horseshoe was carefully nailed 
over the door to guard against. 

In colonial architecture the important point was the chimney. To-day, it a 
man's house is built on a county or State line, his residence is held to be in 
whatever geographical division holds his kitchen chimney. Then, as now, the 
chimney was the vital spot. Around it the house was erected. Into its solid, 
rough masonry was built the wide oven — the great bakeoven that accomplished 
things in the culinary line that are to us only a maddening tradition — with, 
perhaps, the scent hiding place, cunningly constructed, which was as much a 
fashion as the secret drawers in old desks. 

Sometimes, in place of wood, stone or even brick was used in the old 
houses. There stands at Tarrytown, N. Y., such a house, built in 1684. It 
was the home of Sir Frederic Filipse, and was generally known as the Filipse 
Castle Its walls are very thick, built of stone and embrasured in the lower 



TYPICAL MANOR HOUSES. 



555 



part for howitzers. The gambrel roof is of the Dutch type. The doors and 
interior wood-work are heavy oak, and the immense chimney, now torn down, 
was said to have contained a storeroom large enough to victual the castle for a 
siege. Tradition 
also tells of a 
subterranean 
vault, the en- 
trance now walled 
up, where forty or 
fifty head of stock 
could be hidden. 
A frame addition 
to this old house 
was made by the 
Be ek mans just 
alter the War for 
Independence. It 
contained a broad 
hallway, at the 
rear of which is a 
winding stairway 
with the light 
spindling balus- 
ters of colonial 
date. At the rear 
is a broad, low 
piazza looking out 
upon the marsh 
and the river. 

There was 
another style, 
much affected at 
a later date, which 
was incongruous, 
though much ad- 
mired. That was 
the transplanted 
< ireek temple. 

The classic revival of a century or more ago struck the New World as well as the 
Old. It expressed itself in the dresses of women and in the houses of the rich. 
Porticos that were designed for summer skies, facades that had little in common 




55 6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

with a winter climate, were the fashion. No one can gainsay the chaste beauty 
of the classic models, nor can the effort to adopt and adapt them to American 
homes be defended on any ground of common sense. To this class belong the 
Hazard house at Newport, R. I., and the extensive, dignified pile known as 
Hyde Hall at Cooperstown, N. Y. 

Of Southern houses, which were typically different from those of the North, 
the Stratford house, built by General Robert E. Lee's great-grandfather, and 
Mount Vernon, are perhaps the best known, the latter too well so to need 
description. The Stratford house was built of English brick, in the form of 
two cubes, united by a central building which set back further than the ends, 
making a recessed front. The roofs receded from all sides toward two mas- 
sive clusters of chimneys, one at each end, which were curiously grouped so as 
to form balconies between them. The presence of chimneys was not by any 
means a distinguishing feature of Southern mansions, since many of them were 
arranged without reference to the cook, whose domain was apart, under a sepa- 
rate roof. 

Primarily, the question, North or South, was how to meet most thoroughly 
and economically the requirements of climate. War — a defensive war against 
heat and cold — was the first condition to be considered. The wealthy could, 
to a certain extent, follow an architectural fancy, and if its details presented 
inconveniences, he might overcome them by artificial means. Lavish expendi- 
ture would accomplish a great deal. But the persons of moderate means, 
which term included ninety-nine-one-hundredths of the Americans of the last 
century, kept on with their wide, log-burning chimneys, "lean-tos," that afforded 
a wind-break, roofs gambrel or peaked, walls of rubble or sides of shingle ; or 
their wide, tree-shadowed door, detached kitchen, deep piazzas that the wind 
could draw through, and rooms so connected that the cool draughts might 
penetrate them. We have never been nearer a national architecture. 

A DRY TIME IN ART. 

We must not linger too long on the other side of the Revolutionary line. 
The dwellings of the sixty-six millions of people on this side are, in some 
respects, of much greater interest than those of the four millions on that. 

There was a time in the United States when all art, architecture included, 
was a stranger. From the ugliness of our coinage — still maintained — to the 
ugliness of our homes was an almost unrelieved desert. There were a few 
protests, survivals, most of them, like the gabled charm of Washington Irving' s 
Sunnyside, spots where- taste might find a rallying-point. But, for the most, 
size was the measure of importance, and the ill-built, ugly shingle-palace had 
its day. It needs no description ; the cheerlessness of its barren front, the 
ghastly stare of its windows, haunt the memory still. 



THE DAWN OF IMPROVEMENT. 



557 



The first one to address himself to the correction of our taste for building- 
was Andrew Jackson Downing. He was born in Newburg, N. Y., October 31, 
18 1 5, and attracted early attention by his writings on Landscape Gardening 
and Rural Architecture, a book of his bearing that title long being our 
authority. Mr. Downing accomplished not a little in improving public taste 
He suggested the cottage known by his name. N. P. Willis and other celebrities 
building them on the banks of the Hudson. They were Gothic as to roof, with 
piazzas. The general objection is that the second-story rooms meeting the 
roof are not square, and the rooms are very hot in summer. Downing was 
the best architect of cottage buildings in his day, but his methods have since 




AN OLD MARYLAND MANOR HOUSE. 



been superseded by better construction and taste and better adaptation to the 
necessities of our climate. He was drowned in the Hudson River, near 
Hastings, July 28, 1852, when the steamboat " Henry Clay," on which he was a 
passenger, was burned. 

The next evidence of an improved taste took the form of incongruous 
details and tawdry, meretricious ornament. The reign ot "gingerbread " work, 
scroll-saw trimmings, barbarism in paint, had begun. In general form and 
plan the American country house remained unchanged, but over the familiar 
cubes were stuck all manner of cheap trimmings. Intrinsic changes came 
later. 



558 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The summer cottage is a thing apart, to be classed rather with the tent and 
the wigwam of the nomad, than with the home of the inhabitant. Its position on 
mountain side or sea shore is usually determined by some purely aesthetic con- 
sideration. During the greater part of the year it is not habitable. The more 
expensive villa, that is looked upon simply in the light of an elegant summer 
shelter, has often many points to commend it to the artist, but is hardly to be 
taken more seriously than the other as a domicile. These are largely in the 
nature of expensive camps, play-houses for the wealthy. But there is an almost 
insensible transition from the cottage camp to the country home, and the develop- 
ment of the modern country or suburban house is worth consideration. 

The revival may be considered to have begun at the time of the Centennial 
Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. For the first time the majority of Americans 
visiting the Quaker City, saw models of cottages that showed the English high 
water mark in rural architecture, and they were impressed as by a revelation. 
Calcott became a name not soon to be forgotten. Copying for awhile these 
English models, the Americans after some years began to realize the worth of 
the national, colonial type, and the development began in earnest. To-day, we 
have, externally, the solid stone and broad quiet dignity of the English Squire's 
house, to which have been superadded the quaintness of the Dutch and the 
simplicity of the New England type. Gambrel roof, rubble chimney, and 
shingled sides have each their place. 

INTERIOR OF THE COUNTRY HOUSE. 

Within the country house the change has not been less striking. At first 
the plan was so uniform that one might go blindfolded through a hundred 
houses after he had seen one. The front door was exactly in the middle and 
opened into a hall (so-called ) or entry, that abandoned half its narrow space to 
a stairway which began its uncompromising ascent just beyond the parlor door. 
The rooms to the right of the hall were entered by doors that were just opposite 
the corresponding rooms on the left. The back door was so nearly like the 
front that the house might have been turned squarely around without the change 
being discovered except for the fact that the stairs would run the wrong way, 
and that the front yard was generally better arranged for show than the rear. 
Now many estimable people all over the country are living in that kind of a 
house still, but it is not the most modern nor the best. 

Gradually the hall widened — even became irregular in shape. An open 
fireplace, with the ancestral andirons, was sometimes added. The entrance no 
longer counted so many feet from this angle and an equal number from the 
opposite one. Back went the stairway and curled itself, up into a more graceful 
form, holding out even hospitable offers of rest for the lame or the lazy on the 
way up. Here and there a window that seemed to have a shape and an indi- 



THE CITY HOUSE. 



559 



viduality of its own peeped in, and finally it really seems as though the house 
has become plastic and has moulded itself about the numbers, and the shapes, 
and the needs, and even the whims of the people who occupy it. And that, if 
any one cares to know, the greatest secret of the nineteenth century is, what a 
house is for. 

The time when comforts and luxuries were for the few, while the husks of 
life went to the poor majority, 
are past in America. The girl 
who knew nothing better than 
the straw shake-down in the half- 
story farm house loft, whose 
roses were freshened every morn- 
ing by cold water brought by 
her own strong arms from the 
cistern, ends her days in a more 
luxurious fashion. She has be- 
come accustomed to the service 
of the modern genii, steam and 
electricity. 

The city house, as we now 
know it, is the latest expression 
of modern thought ; at once a 
confession of increased needs 
and a triumphant proclamation 
that those needs have been met 
and provided for. Of course, 
economy of space on the ground 
is a question more and more to 
be considered, so that we have 
got in a habit of building sky- 
ward. I his determines the gen- 
eral proportion of a city house, 
and regulates its economy by 
conditions quite the opposite of 

those which we find in the country house. The improvements in form began 
some years earlier in the former than in the latter, but it is still to the past few 
years that we owe what is typical in the city home. A custom which claims 
Philadelphia as its birthplace, of having the common or living rooms of the 
family upon the first floor and almost on a level with the street, has been done 
away with. Generally, in the newer style of house, the elevation of the first floor 
above the street level has been found to be desirable, and the parlor and library 




ANCIENT BLOCK HOUSE, ALASKA. 



560 *THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

are often, for convenience, placed a story higher than the drawing-room and 
dining-room. The last is usually at the rear, and often so built that its section 
of the building is practically semi-detached, having no connection with the rest 
of the house except on the first floor. This gives opportunity to have the 
kitchen where it should be, at the top of the house. 

It has been no part of the purpose of this chapter to treat of domestic 
architecture, except where the connection is most apparent between it and the 
home-life of the people. Sometimes the shape or ornamentation of a house 
gives so vivid an idea of the character of its inhabitants that it presses upon 
our notice, like the description given in Olney's geography of the city of 
Albany, "which is situated at the head of navigation on the Hudson River, is 
the capital of New York State and contains eight thousand houses and forty 
thousand inhabitants with their gable ends all toward the street." 

The houses of most of our cities afford more variety than that. Individu- 
ality of taste and a much larger opportunity for choice in articles of furniture 
or decoration lead to more originality. Where the grandfathers and grand- 
mothers had their sanded floors just alike, with broom patterns that were 
sanctioned by fashion, there is an almost endless range of Axminsters, Brussels, 
Kensingtons, or what-you-will, for the grandchildren. The common cherry and 
rarer mahogany, plainly and soberly fashioned (with here and there a decorous 
curve, as though Endicott or Penn had essayed to cut a pigeon-wing) are sup- 
planted by devices in furniture that actually lend themselves to the comfort ot 
man. The andirons that are so carefully arranged in the open fireplace have 
gone over to the brie- a-brac. For utility in heating commend us to the steam, 
hot water or furnace heating of the modern house. 

Our walls are no longer bare nor do the clock and candlesticks hold 
undisputed possession of the mantel shelf. An ordinary dwelling house will 
show more of art to-day than would the best mansion of a century ago. 
Pictures, or copies of pictures are within the reach of everybody ; there has 
been a general education in taste all along the line. We have grown up ' to the 
water color and the etching, the bit of china or the fragment of bronze. That 
we have had to reach the present point of vantage through the door of cheap 
chromos and gaudy ceramics that were not as honest or as elevating as the 
pewter of our grandmothers, is not perhaps to be deplored, since we have 
got through. 

Gloom has not so much of a place in our homes as it used to have. 
Perhaps it began to go out with the. black hair-cloth we used to know so well. 
If there is not more of joy in our lives, there is at least more of brightness in 
our homes. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 



TRAPPING A.ND HUNTING. 



WHEN, in 1607, Samuel de 
Champlain asked his King, the 
shrewd Henry of Navarre, for 
aid in American explorations, 
he dwelt chiefly on the benefit 
Prance would derive from, fur 
trade with the Indians. Cham- 
plain had been in Arcadia with 
De Monts, and he saw. clearer 
than any man of his time, 
the immense profits of a com- 
merce by which costly furs 
might be obtained in exchange 
for trinkets of little value. The 
King, who had learned with envy 
of the Mexican gold which en 
riched the coffers of his brother 
of Spain, listened attentively to 
the explorer's tales of a product 
to be wrested from Canadian wastes which should rival in value the gold of the 
South. 

In 1608 Champlain, in command of a French ship, sailed up the St. Law- 
rence, landed at the Indian village of Stadacone, and built a tort on land now 
covered by the city of Quebec. In his journal Champlain assures us that his 
chief object was to carry Christianity to the benighted heathen natives ; doubt- 
less he was sincere, but the real force back of the man must have been his 
insatiable desire for exploration, a desire which is indicated in almost every act 
of his adventurous life. In those days men still dreamed of a northwest passage 
to India, and Champlain, in 1612, made a wearisome journey far up the Ottawa 
River, led by the plausible falsehoods of a Frenchman who pretended to have 
gone to the west of the sources of that river until his Indian guides showed him 
36 561 




- A'w/V^'i'i C-jl.-ny, in Ij-J. l-yj<ih 
1 of the British -Museum. ) 



562 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the waters of the Pacific. While Champlain was a devout Catholic, and eager 
for discoveries, he knew that the foundation of his colony must be the fur trade. 
Stout woodmen and zealous priests were needed, but money to support these 
was to come from the fur trader. 

From trading posts at Quebec and Montreal the French pioneers sent each 
year across the sea furs, the value of which far exceeded that of the cod, which 
the hardy fishermen of the Breton coast had begun obtaining from the Banks of 
New Foundland as early as the year 1504. 

In the spring these furs were brought by frail crafts of the Huron and 
Algonquin and Montagnai — fearless canoemen, who, by intricate rivers and over 
long "carrys," came to barter with the French the fruits of their winter's 
trapping. While the whites cheated the Indians without hesitation, it must 
be said, to the credit of France, that no trader was permitted to buy furs 
with whisky. 

With the ready adaptability of his race, the French trader fell into Indian 
ways, often took to himself a dusky wife, and, as he prospered, set up a house- 
hold something after the fashion of a Roman patrician, his clients being a crowd 
of Indian hangers-on. Easy-going and jovial, he quickly won the confidence 
of the natives — a confidence he rarely abused by unfairness or cruelty. 

Besides the richer traders, there was another class, made up of perhaps the 
most picturesque figures of these picturesque times. The couriers-des-bois, or 
rangers-of-the-woods, were whites who joined the Indians in their winter trap- 
ping expeditions, growing almost as wild as the savages themselves. In his 
long capote, bright-colored flannel shirt, corduroy trousers, leather leggings, 
moccasins, and pulled low on his swarthy forehead a red cap of knitted wool, 
the courier-des-bois was a personage of striking appearance. Soon he became 
a better trapper than the Indian. 

The chief prey of the trapper was the beaver, but martens, foxes, bears, 
deer, wolves, and wild-cats were also despoiled ( of their coats. 

Follow Pierre, the courier-des-bois, up the Ottawa, where he journeys 
in the canoes of a party of Algonquins. From the head-waters of the river 
they branch to the northwest, into a country full of small lakes and winding 
inlets. Camping on the shores of one of the lakes, they prepare to gather 
the harvest yielded of snow and ice. Perhaps one of the men is set aside 
as hunter, to provide meat for the camp — not a difficult task in a land abound- 
ing in game. It is early winter, but frost and snow come betimes in this 
northern wilderness, and as Pierre looks out over the bosom of the little 
lake he sees a white expanse, smooth and unbroken. Yet not quite unbroken, 
for near the opposite shore he can make out, among the reeds that show above 
the snow, some small, conical mounds rising above the snow-covered ice. 

The courier-des-bois well knows what those mounds mean — they mark 



HUNTING THE BEAVER. 



563 



a settlement of the beaver. After the squaws have got ready breakfast, and 
it is eaten, he puts on his snow-shoes, takes his rifle ami a.x, and starts forth ; 
several Indians, one of whom drags a toboggan, go with him. At this season 
the beaver are partially torpid, and fall an easy prey to the experienced 
trapper. The beaver village being reached, the ice is cut away near one of 
the mounds or houses on the side nearest the shore, for on that side, under 
water, is the entrance. In the meanwhile, an Indian has gone ashore, cut 
some long saplings, and pointed the larger ends ; these are driven down close 
to the house, over the entrance, so as to prevent the beavers' escape. I hen 




I'NTKY KIDIN'i; IN AMERICA. THE MEET FOR A FOX-HUNT. 



Pierre goes to work with his ax and chops into the mound, a difficult matter, 
tor the little wads of mud and chewed grass of which it is built are, in the 
miter layers, frozen tightly together. At last his task is done, and he can 
reach into the upper or dry cavity. Here is where the beaver passes the 
winter; and, it so drowsy as not to be disturbed by the turmoil, here it stays 
until, being pulled out by Pierre, it is thrown on to the ice to be killed — poor, 
sleepy beast — by a blow from one of the Indians. Perhaps several more of 
the household are taken from the upper story. Below is a cavity, partially filled 
with water, where may be collected those of the inmates which have tried to 
escape, but been prevented by the poles driven across the entrance. These 



564 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

animals are also captured, and the trappers return to camp with a well-laden 
toboggan. 

For a week or more they linger around the little lake, trapping the marten 
and fox, and catching what few beavers survived the first raid on their village. 
When fur-bearing animals become scarce they go to another lake where are 
fresh supplies of beaver. 

The marten, or sable, a graceful little creature, somewhat resembling the 
weasel in appearance, is much prized for its soft, reddish-brown fur. It is about 
sixteen inches in length, has a long bushy tail, and is an expert climber, spend- 
ing most of its life among the tree-tops ; young birds, mice, and even hare are 
its prey. 

To catch the marten, Pierre and his Indian friends go back from the lake till 
they come to a hard-wood ridge, such as is often seen parallel to the shores of 
Canadian lakes ; along this ridge, some twenty rods apart, they set their traps. 
These are called "dead-falls," contrivances easily made with the help of ax and 
knife ; the bait, a bit of meat, is so arranged that, in order to reach it, the animal 
must squeeze between two horizontal poles, the upper pole being supported by 
two twigs, to one of which the bait is fastened. When the bait is seized, the 
support of the upper pole is disturbed and it falls ; the marten caught between 
the two poles is almost invariably killed. 

Of the foxes the most valuable is the black fox ; its fur is glossy black, 
save a few white hairs on the back and a white tuft at the end of the tail. The 
silver fox only differs from the black variety in having more white hairs along 
its back. Next in value is the common red fox, then the cross fox, a cross 
between the black or silver and red fox, and last, of least value, the white, or 
Arctic fox. 

These cunning animals were usually caught in steel traps supplied by the 
French. Being set in the snow just so as to be hidden, the bait was scattered 
around. The trapper must take care not to leave many signs of his presence or 
the fox will suspect danger and keep away. The trap's chain is not fastened so 
as to keep the captured animal a close prisoner, for if that is done a fox will 
often gnaw its leg off and escape on three feet ; the chain is attached to a pole 
or clog, which impedes the captive ami enables the trapper to find it, while not 
completely checking it. Muskrats and mink have also this habit of gnawing 
off their feet, and the writer has killed several possessed of but three feet. 

The mink were trapped along the water courses, either with dead-falls or 
steel traps. In early times, when valuable animals were common, the trappers 
disdained to spend their time catching the musk-rat, and that little creature 
was left as prey for the Indian boys. Other animals sought for their pelts were 
the bear, deer, moose, buffalo, otter, and, more especially on the Pacific 
coast, the seal and sea-otter. 



MR. ASTOR'S VENTURE IN THE FUR TRADE. 



S65 



Stories of these valuable sea-otters and seals found on the northwest coast 
caused Jacob Astor, a New York merchant who had already acquired wealth 
and prominence, to plan an American Fur Company, having- its headquarters 
at the mouth of the Columbia River. In this venture he had promises ot sup- 
port from the United States Government, which had become alarmed at the 
increasing monopoly of the British fur companies. After Canada fell into the 
hands ot the English several great fur companies were formed — the Northwest 
Company, the Mackinaw Company, and the Hudson Bay Company. These 




associations, especially the two first named, were encroaching on territory 
claimed by the United States, and were exerting undue influence over the 
Indians. So the Government encouraged Mr. Astor with promises of help. 

In 1 S 1 1 , Mr. Astor's expedition, a band of traders and hunters, alter a 
march across the continent, of almost incredible hardship, reached the desti- 
nation of the colony. A rude fort was built, and the place called Astoria. 
Each year a ship of supplies, destined also to bring back furs to New York or 
dispose of them in China (then a great mart for furs), was to be sent to Astoria 
by Mr. Astor. 



566 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

A series of disasters to the ships sent out, disappointment as to the quan- 
tity of furs found inland from Astoria, and, above all, the breaking out of war 
with Great Britain, which prevented the sending of more ships from New York, 
led, in 1813, to the abandonment of Astoria to the English. 

One of Mr. Astor's chief agents, who had formerly been in the employ of 
the English Northwest Company, was criticised for too quickly surrendering 
Astoria. Force was given this criticism by the fact that the agent sold to the 
Northwest Company what goods and pelts were at Astoria for much less than 
their value, and immediately went into the employ of that company. So failed 
a great plan, the success of which was of vast importance to the United States 
Government. 

Gradually the control of the fur industry came into the hands of the Hudson 
Bay Company, which each spring accumulated great quantities of furs at their 
chief depots — Fort Vancouver, on the Pacific ; Fort York, on Hudson's Bay, 
and Moose Factory, on James Bay. The North and Northwest, a land of 
dense forests, broad rivers, lakes, Mower-covered prairies, swamps, and moun- 
tains, was filled with their employes ; most of these were Highlanders, hardy 
fellows, well-fitted for the rough life ; mixed with them were French-Canadians, 
descendants of the first couriers-des-bois, and also half-breed and Indian trap- 
pers. In winter these men roamed over the desolate wastes collecting furs, the 
rich harvest of the North ; enduring many hardships, fatigue, cold, and hunger ; 
often for weeks living on tripe-de-roche, a lichen which would grow on the most 
barren rock. In summer the wilderness was astir with canoes of the voyageur 
bringing in furs to the depots. 

All America abounded with game, ranging from the great musk-oxen of 
Eskimo-land to the slender deer of the Mexican Gulf. But nowhere was it 
more plentiful than in the woods and prairies of the Mississippi Valley. Here 
ranged the great herds of buffalo, the chief food-supply of the savage. In 
summer the prairie Indian feasted on choice portions of the flesh ; in autumn 
he put by for winter use quantities of pemmican. This pemmican was the 
common winter food of trappers and hunters ; to make it, the buffalo meat was 
cut into strips, dried in the sun, pounded between two stones until bruised and 
broken into small bits, then packed in bags of buffalo skin, the hair outside. 
Next, a quantity of melted grease was poured into each bag, and, finally, the 
bags sewed up as tightly as possible. The Indians usually ate it uncooked ; 
but the whites, when they could, mixed in flour and water and boiled it. 
Pemmican was a wholesome dish and not unpleasant to one who did not fear to 
eat a few buffalo hairs. 

In this valley also, especially on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mount- 
ains, lives the grizzly or grisly bear — the beast which is to the new world what 
the Bengal tiger is to Asia. The Indians were in terror of the grizzly : indeed, 



THE BEAR FAMILY. 567 

they had no weapons effective against an animal which, above all creatures on 
the earth, is tenacious of life. Yet the grizzly is not the most powerful of 
American bears ; for the bears, unlike the more formidable of the carnivora, 
such as lions, tigers, etc., get their greatest size when furthest from the 
equator. Thus the polar or white bear, in size, and strength, though not in 
ferocity, ranks first among- the bears. It is sometimes nine feet in length, and 
its weight fifteen hundred pounds. While the polar bear is not so aggressive 
as the grizzly, it has no fear of man, and the hunters and trappers take care 
to give it a wide berth. 

Through all the East and South are found the black bears, growing 
smaller and more timid as the tropics are approached. They have nothing of 
the ferocity of the grizzly, and are as shy as a deer. Black bears are able to 
climb trees, an accomplishment which nature has fortunately denied to the 
more savage species. 

West of the Rocky Mountains is the cinnamon bear, so called from its 
color ; in habits it closely resembles the black bear, but is somewhat larger. 

The black bear is a difficult creature to successfully hunt, and more are 
killed in chance encounters than in any other way. At the south the planters 
used to hunt them with packs of dogs, a cross of slow fox-hound and mastiff 
being the favorite breed ; at the east they are tracked by means of small cur 
dogs, which, nimbly keeping out of reach of the clumsy animal's teeth ; :, I 
claws, will yelp at its heels and annoy it until Bruin, in disgust, takes refuge in 
a tree, where it is found by the hunter, guided to the spot by the yelps of his 
dog. 

This bear is fond of ripening buckwheat and oats, and in autumn nights 
will vary raids on the calf-pasture and pig-sty by a trip to the grain field, where 
he creates havoc, not only stripping stalks of their heads, but plunging about in 
the grain, rolling, and crushing it tlat in very wantonness of destruction. Then 
the farmer's boy gets out the great rusty, iron trap, unused since " Gran'- 
ther " caught the catamount. If the bear is in the habit of coming to the 
grain, it has a beaten way of approach ; but should there be no such path in 
which to set the menacing iron jaws, the boy will bait his trap with a piece of 
meat or, better still, with a lump of honey — a delicacy which Bruin scents afar 
off. 

The most difficult method of killing the black bear is the one sometimes 
adopted by a tough old Canadian hunter, a man who boasts himself a courier- 
dcs-bois. When the first snow comes, he takes his rifle, and going to some 
swamp he thinks is the haunt of a bear, finds the track, starts the animal, and 
then follows. A weary tramp is before him ; during the first hour or two the 
bear, frightened by the man whom it scented or heard when first started, plunges 
through the woods at a clumsy gallop, and so gets a long lead. Finally the 



5 ms 



THE STORY OE AMERICA. 



hunter sees that the track is fresher — the game is close by ; he steals forward 
with noiseless moccasins, hoping for a shot; but the bear is apt to scent him and 
start again. These manouvers may be repeated many times before the Cana- 
dian's sharp eyes catch a glimpse of glossy fur, and a bullet ends the chase. 

Though, as a rule, a timid beast, an old bear with cubs is often dangerous. 
Early in the century there lived in Northern New York a religious exhorter, 
who, in summer, was accustomed to walk, if necessary, to remote communities 
in need of religious instruction. The crood man was famed for his vehement. 



^ 




MRS. HOB WHITE AND FAMILY. 



full-lunged exhortations. One morning in spring he set out to visit a settle- 
ment surrounded by the forest. In the afternoon of that day some of the 
settlers at work near the edge oi the clearing were startled to hear coming 
from the woods a well-known voice, which cried out with all its pulpit power : — 
"If thee won't help me, Good Lord, don't help the bear ! " 
The men, hurrying to the rescue, found the preacher grappling with a 
bear which was trying to hug him to death. He had drawn a knife, plunging 
it into the animal's side, but the chances were all in favor of the bear when the 



BOONE— THE BUFFALO— THE DEER. 569 

help ol which he had despaired came, in the shape of the men and their brush- 
hooks. It turned out that he had seen a cub and tried to catch it ; the little 
animal's cries summoned an angry mother. 

Polar bears that are killed are usually shot by men in boats. The seal 
hunters do not care to come face to face with the great bear on its native ice 
Hoe. 

As for the grizzly, it is not game for hunters ; it does the hunting itself. 
A rumor, current in the U. S. Army, is to the effect that Gen. Crook, of Indian- 
fighting fame, is the one man who single-handed has walked up to a grizzly, 
challenged it, and killed it. Most men prefer to walk the other way. 

Doubtless there were voyageurs and carriers-des-bois, mighty hunters, that 
threaded the wilds of North America in advance of civilization, who did valiant, 
though unfamed, deeds in their fights with the grizzly. Books of pioneer 
adventure in the West, like Lewis and Clark's "Journal " or Irving's "Astoria," 
are full of the exploits of Pierres and Antoines. Parkman has told the adven- 
tures of Champlain's hardy guide, Etienne Brule. But perhaps no figure is 
more real as a type of the ideal man of the woods than Cooper's creation, 
Natty Bumpo, the Leather-stocking — the hunter, philosopher, and fighter. 

Without question, Daniel Boone is the greatest figure among pioneer 
hunters. Born in Pennsylvania in 1735, but passing his youth in Kentucky, he 
soon became famous as a hunter and Indian fighter. Taken into the United 
States army, he built Boonesborough, on the Kentucky River. In 1778 he was 
captured by the Indians and taken to Canada, where, having won the good will 
of his captors, he was adopted into the tribe. Soon he escaped and returned 
to Kentucky : that State, however, growing too civilized to suit his taste, the 
pioneer pushed further west, dying in 1820, in the State of Missouri. Boone 
was a man of great strength and endurance, a sure marksman, a hunter and 
warrior-of-the-woods of unequaled prowess — the type of a class of restless, 
daring spirits who always keep in advance of the settler's ax. 

The buffalo was the animal furnishing most food to the Indians who hunted 
over the wide prairies of the central and western States, but, taking into con- 
sideration all North America, the different varieties of deer were doubtless 
more important to the natives — flesh, hide, and sinews were all used, and 
all seemed indispensable. In the South the Virginian, or common red deer, 
gave food and clothing ; in the North its sinews were also prized ; they were 
used in making the snow-shoes which enabled the Indian to take long jour- 
neys. In summer he could only travel great distances in canoes ; in winter the 
crusted snow made all the country into one broad, smooth highway, over which 
with the aid of snow-shoes and toboggan, journeying with his household goods 
was made easy to the Indian. 

In the North, from Maine to the Pacific, roamed, and still roams, though 



57o 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



in less numbers, the great, American elk or moose, as it is commonly called — 
the largest of the deer family, standing five feet or over at the shoulders, and 
as heavy as a horse While possessed of great speed, the moose is not a 
graceful runner, nor a well-proportioned animal. There is a sinister look about 
its head — too big for even the large body — about its long, ugly, lower lip and 
small, wicked, eyes, a look which does not belie the creature, as hunters who 
have encountered a wounded bull moose can amply testify. In the rutting 
season, that is, in October and November, the bulls are vicious, and often will 
attack a man without provocation. Formerly, many, when "yarding" in the deep 
snow, wert- killed by the hunters on snow-shoes ; but such butcheries have 




LANDING A MONSTER ALLIGATOR IN LOUISIANA. 



been stopped by the Canadian authorities, who feared the total extinction ot 
the animal most typical of the gloomy forest and great barren wastes of 
the North. 

Near the Rocky Mountains, especially in the country drained by the 
1 Fpper .Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, is found the American stag, or wapiti. 
These beautiful animals are often called elks, a name which in America 
belongs only to the moose. The wapiti stands four to five feet at the shoulder 
and is a well-made, gallant-looking creature ; its antlers, unlike those of the 
elk family, which are heavy and broad, are slender and branch two or three 
times, making a fine crown to the head. This deer has little of the savage 



DEER-HUNTING. 571 

iiature of the moose, is shy and difficult to shoot ; a few stags still survive in 
the Yellowstone Park region. 

The mule deer, also native to the slopes of the Rockies, is intermediate 
in size between the wapiti and the Virginian deer, whose height is only two 
and a half or three feet. The mule deer's most marked characteristic is the 
length of its ear, from which it derives its name. 

West of the Rockies is the black-tailed deer, which seems to take the place 
in that region of the Virginia deer, a species it much resembles. 

Deer are hunted in a great variety of ways. In the South, before the war, 
packs of fleet hounds were often kept em the larger plantations. The planter 
and his friends, men and women, would follow on horseback as dogs and game 
burst through the oak-openings or pine-woods where there was little under- 
brush to trouble a rider. Finally the deer would be brought to bay, pulled 
down by the dogs or dispatched by the hunters. This deer-coursing, which had 
many features in common with a cross-country fox-hunt, is now seldom prac- 
ticed ; it was, perhaps, the most picturesque form of the hunt to be found in 
America. 

In the more northerly regions many deer are killed by still-hunters. 
The best time is in the late autumn when a light snow covers the ground, and 
the deer are still haunting the clearings, not yet having taken up winter quarters 
in the recesses of the forest. Finding a deer track the hunter follows, stealthily, 
until he gets a shot at his victim. 

Until of late years, when the game laws are more strictly enforced, deer 
were slaughtered in the summer months by night-hunters. In warm weather 
the deer, tormented by insects, come to the shallows of ponds and lakes to cool 
themselves and find relief from flies. The night-hunter, having a darkened 
jack-lantern in the bow of his boat, is silently paddled among the lily pads. 
When the splashing of a deer is heard, the lantern is uncovered, and flashes 
full on the astonished animal. The boat and men back of the lantern are in- 
visible, and the deer, with the curiosity of its kind, stands in the blaze of light 
and snorts with wonder. Now it is an easy mark, and a charge of buckshot 
is poured into it. 

Night- or jack-hunting was carried on in the hot nights of July and August 
months, when the deer are in poor condition, and when the (awns are yet 
dependent on the does. Fortunately this so-called sport, by which hundreds oi 
deer were butchered for their hides, is becoming a thing of the past. 

One of the deer's instincts is used for its destruction, particularly by the 
hunters of Maine, Michigan, and the Adirondacks. The deer's instinct teaches 
it, when it hears the howls of pursuing animals, to baffle them by running to 
water. A deer track is found, hounds put on, and the hunters station themselves 
along the banks of rivers, or, if the nearest water is a lake, watch that in boats 



572 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

If the deer goes to the water which the hunters are watching, and does not see 
or scent them, they may have a shot at it as it wades across the stream or 
bounds over the banks ; if it tries to swim a lake, and men in boats see it, they 
have every opportunity of killing a deer. 

Though at first sight this "hounding" deer seems cruel — in fact it is one 
of the least destructive methods — the deer has many chances of escape ; it may 
baffle the dogs in forest, swamps, or brooks, or if driven to water, is very likely 
to elude the watchers. Hounding is now prohibited, save in a few of the 
autumn months. In North America are found two varieties of antelope — the 
Rocky Mountain sheep or goat, and the common antelope, or prong-horn — the 
latter, an animal somewhat smaller than the Virginian deer, being the cabree of 
the voyageur. The prong-horn is yet plentiful, herds being often seen on the 
plains west of the Mississippi. In winter its long outer hair becomes thick 
and brittle, giving the animal a perfect protection from the blizzards that 
rage over Western prairies. The Rocky Mountain goat, an animal having a 
shaggy coat of wool, inhabits the most desolate parts of the Rocky Mountains. 
It is not plentiful and is extremely shy. 

As the big game gradually disappears, more attention is given our game 
birds. The expert wing-shot has taken the place of the rifle marksman — the 
man who could boast of "barking" a squirrel at forty yards. First of 
American game birds is the wild turkey, whose domestic descendant, contrary 
to the usual rule, is only a degenerate scion. The wild bird excels in size and in 
the flavor of its flesh. At one time great flocks were in the Southern-Central 
States ; but their numbers have been reduced by hunters and by four-footed 
enemies — the fox, especially, slaughters the young birds. 

The wild swan was once found, though it was never common. Geese and 
brant are still shot, and wild ducks are numerous. But of all our birds the 
grouse family affords best sport to the wing-shot. The biggest member of the 
grouse family is the sage-hen, a heavy, somewhat stupid bird. It lives in the 
sage barrens of the Northwest, and its flesh tastes unpleasantly strong of the 
sage. The pinnated grouse or prairie-chicken was scattered throughout the 
Fast, not so very long ago, in New York being called the " heath-hen " ; but 
now they are only found in the prairie country, where they are plentiful, and 
much hunted by lovers of wing-shooting. 

No grouse is a better example of its alert, swift-winged family than the 
ruffed grouse, which is found throughout all the temperate regions east of the 
Rockies. It is a beautifully marked bird, is wary, prompt and strong on the 
wing ; when whirring with the velocity of a bullet through thick New England 
swamps, no more difficult mark for the gunner can be imagined. This grouse 
is often called the partridge, but erroneously so ; there being no partridges in 
North America. Less common varieties are the sharp-tailed and the Canada 



GROUSE, QUAIL, ETC. 



573 



grouse, both found in the northern districts ; still further to the north is the 
ptarmigan or white grouse. The quail, or Bob White, which abounds in 
the Central and Southern States, is a great favorite of the gunner, who uses 
setters or pointers in his shooting. Nor are woodcock, snipe, and plover lack- 
ing. Though the sporting rifle is gradually giving way to the fowling-piece, 




WAN I1KAVK, ALASKA 



North America is still a land of happy hunting grounds for the gunner. He 
may exercise his skill in bringing down a whirring grouse, and, if he is devoted 
to his rifle, he may still try his marksmanship in stopping a leaping buck, or 
in putting a bullet into the eye of one of the great alligators that lounge 
in Louisiana bayous. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 



HUNTING AND FISHING 




{J-romthe Original Drawing made by John Whi, 
By Permission of the British. M 



In the middle ages, when the Roman 
church was at the height of its influence, 
there was a great demand for fish to be 
used at the different fasts imposed on the 
people. The abbots and bishops could 
grandly dine oft" turbot and lamprey ; but 
the pious peasant found it difficult to get 
the herring and cod necessary to satisfy 
his conscience and his stomach. 

Thus, when Sebastian Cabot came sail- 
ing home to England from his voyage to 
the New World, his reports of the great 
schools of fish seen off New Foundland 
carried joyful news to the Christian na- 
tions. Hereafter the hardships of Lent 
would be lessened, and that without any hard-earned dispensation from the 
Church. 

The first well-authenticated record points to the year 1504 as the one in 
which Europeans first went a-fishing across the Atlantic ; and then it was not 
the English, but the hardy, adventurous sailors of the Breton coast of France 
who were the pioneers. The fishermen who had hitherto confined their industry 
to the less turbulent coasts of Europe, or, as a long trip, gone to the cod-waters 
of Norway and Iceland, now braved the storms of the broad Atlantic, and 
returned with a harvest which at that time was the richest product of the north- 
ern regions of America. 

Spanish and British seamen followed the Frenchmen, and at one time there- 
were one hundred Spanish vessels engaged in the fisheries; but the gold of the 
south had more attractions for the Spaniard, and by the middle of the seven- 
teenth century his connection with the New Foundland fisheries had ceased. 
He followed a brighter lure than the scales of the cod, and thereafter the 

5 75 



576 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

subjects of His Most Catholic Majesty had to depend largely on the heretics 
of England and Holland for their Lenten diet. 

The English were more formidable rivals of France ; they sent out a steadily 
increasing number of ships, and it is estimated that by the end of the year 1600 
there were two hundred ships manned by English sailors fishing for cod in the 
Gulf of St. Lawrence and off New Foundland — a few more than the French could 
boast. In 1602, cod were caught in Massachusetts Bay, and Cape Cod received 
its name; in 1614 Captain John Smith had success in fishing off the Maine 
coast. From this time the fisheries of the New England coast were prosecuted 
with vigor by the English. Soon after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, in 
1620, they came to depend on fish as the main food supply for the colony, and 
fishing grew to be the chief industry of New England. 

The New World fisheries soon caused disputes between France and England. 
By the treaty of Utrecht, 17 13, France agreed not to fish within thirty leagues 
of Nova Scotia. In 1820, she built the fortress of Louisburg, on Cape Breton 
Island. But England was not yet satisfied. Louisburg was lost, and by the 
treaty of Paris, 1763, the French gave up the right to fish within fifteen leagues 
of Cape Breton. In spite of such constant wrangling, the fisheries of both coun- 
tries thrived. What British interference could not do to France, her civil troubles 
accomplished, and while the great Revolution lasted, France put by her fishing 
tackle, not to take it out again until after the peace of 181 5. 

While the nations of Europe were quarreling over the cod and mackerel of 
the Eastern coast, and carrying them away to furnish fasts for the Catholic 
world, the nations of America, the native Indians, who roamed by the banks of 
rivers and inland seas, were capturing fish to furnish them their feasts. Fresh 
water fish were everywhere ; each lake, river, pond and brook swarmed with 
them. In the hilly country to the east, and also through the ravines of the 
Rocky Mountains, the Indian crept along trout brooks, with swift arrow stunning 
his prey, as with nose up stream and fins gently fanning the water it lay in some 
cool pool beneath the bank. Or, in the late fall, when the trout of the lakes run 
up small streams to spawn and are sluggish and dull-eyed, the Indian fisherman 
slipped a noose of sinew around them, and, with a quick pull, threw them to the 
land. From the eastern to the western coast, in northern latitudes, he found the 
salmon ; and, when these fish were ascending or descending the rivers in their 
yearly migrations to and from the sea, they came in such quantities as to be easy 
prey. The Indians speared them, or, following the ascending fish to some water- 
fall, caught them in scoop nets as they filled the pools beneath the falls before 
attempting the leap. 

In the Great Lakes were white-fish, pickerel, pike, lake trout and lake 
herring. In winter they were speared through holes cut in the ice ; the Indian, 
lying stretched by mic of these, with a deer-skin thrown over his head in such a 



PRIMITIVE METHODS OF FISHING. 



S77 



way as to exclude daylight from the hole, would peer down into the water ; when 
the game, attracted by a decoy — often the image ot a small fish — swam into sight, 
the fisherman thrust with his spear-hook and rarely failed of success. This spear- 
hook, an implement of bone, having a wooden handle, was, as its name implies, 
a combination of the spear and hook ; it was much used by all the fishing tribes, 
being preferred by the braves to the net, which, to them, seemed a tool more 
befitting the work of squaws. In the hands of a skillful fisherman the spear- 
hook was very effective. 




{From the Painting Ay Gurdon Tr 



Fattening in the mud below the sluggish waters of the Mississippi Valley, 
the Indian found the great cat-fish. Shad abounded in the Connecticut, Hud- 
son, Delaware and Potomac Rivers. The black bass, which rivals the trout in 
gameness, darts through the clear, deep waters of most of the northern lakes, 
but was too shy and deep-dwelling a fish to be often caught by the clumsy tackle 
of the natives. Before the advent of the whites, fish-hooks of bone were used, 
made on the same plan as the steel hooks but more clumsy ; these wire made 
use of chiefly in deep water for catching the larger varieties of fish. 

37 



573 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The Algonquin tribes of the Northeast were especially skillful with the 
spear-hook, and in the early summer months, when the long pickerel, which lived 
in the lakes of their country, came into the shallow water among the reeds in 
search of food, the Algonquin fisherman, having chosen a dark evening, set out 
in his canoe. In the bow was fixed a torch of blazing pine, and the paddle was 
held, often, by a squaw, who with silent sweeps of the blade propelled the canoe 
along the shore. The spearman, standing in the bow, could see, by the glare 
of the torch, the pickerel lying in the shallow water ; a quick movement of his 
arm. a slight splash, and a long, ugly fish was flopping in the canoe, ready to 
receive its death-blow from the woman. 

In early summer, when deer and other game was in poor condition and 
difficult of capture, the fish supply was of much importance to the Indian of the 
Northeast. But as a rule he could not, or would not, take the trouble to cure 
this food for winter consumption. For that season they depended on their 
hunting and trapping ; often, as the early French explorers testify, passing the 
winter in the greatest want. The Indians living in the Columbia River region 
of the Pacific coast, or the "fishing Indians," as the voyageurs called them, 
depended on fish for a large portion of their food at all seasons of the year, and 
were expert fishers. This diet did not seem to agree with them ; for they were 
interior to the flesh-eating tribes. 

It is said that some of the tribes to the south were accustomed to throw 
large quantities of vegetable matter into small lakes and ponds, which, fer- 
menting, caused the fish to be afflicted with a kind of intoxication, when they 
were easily captured, but this savors strongly of the legend. 

The American colonies had done much to help England wrest Cape Breton, 
Nova Scotia and Canada from French control ; in spite of this the mother 
country, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, tried to prevent the colonists 
from fishing on the banks of New Foundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; 
disputes about these fishing privileges aided in bringing about the War of 
Independence. In the final treaty of peace, in 1783, the fisheries question was 
satisfactorily settled. Congress, in 1702, in order to encourage the industry and 
train men in seamanship, re-established the bounty system which the fishermen 
had enjoyed under British rule. All vessels engaged in cod-fishing for four 
months in the year were entitled to a bounty varying from one dollar to two 
dollars and a half per ton, according to their size: three-eighths going to the 
owners, and five-eighths to the fishermen. The war of 181 2 proved the value 
of this nursery for seamen. 

< Mi American coasts the cod is the fish of greatest economic importance. 
It is a thick, heavy fish, sometimes weighing one hundred pounds ; is abundant 
on the Banks of New Foundland, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, off Nova Scotia 
and Labrador, and is found in larye numbers on the northern Pacific coast. It 



THE MIGRATION OF FISHES. 579 

is exceedingly prolific, experts having estimated that a female weighing eighty 
pounds will lay about ten million eggs in one season. Most of these eggs are 
destroyed ; but so many survive that, in spite of the vast number of cod caught 
each year, the supply on the Banks of New Foundland does not seem to 
decrease. In the bays along the New England shore, however, the cod are 
becoming scarce, in some places having entirely disappeared. 

Of all the States, Massachusetts stands first in the importance of her cod 
fisheries. In the early spring the cod-fleet sets out from Gloucester and other 
ports ; the vessels being usually schooners of an average of seventy tons burden, 
and having crews of about ten men. On reaching the banks the schooners 
anchor, and the dories, stout, flat-bottomed row-boats, are brought into use. 
Going out in these, the fishermen set long lines to which are attached hooks by 
shorter lines, the longer line being anchored and buoyed at each end. The 
hooks on these lines, or trawls, as they are called, are baited with mackerel, 
squid, menhaden, or almost any small fish. As a rule the trawls are examined 
twice a day by men in dories. 

Old skippers, who seem to throng every seaboard town of New England, 
are fond of telling of the cod's voracity. They will swallow almost anything 
which attracts their eye ; their stomachs are real curiosity shops, where are 
found, besides great clam shells and occasionally a wild duck, all kinds of 
wreckage and coast refuse, such as bottles, buttons, finger-rings, pieces of 
metal, etc. Naturalists have obtained many rare shells from these fish which 
they, the cod, had swallowed in the deepest parts of ocean. Stones as big as 
hen's eggs are also found in their stomachs, and fishermen have a theory that 
these are swallowed on the approach of a storm, to serve as ballast. 

One reason of the preponderating importance of the cod-fisheries is that 
they can be depended on to yield about the same quantity of fish each season ; 
while other fisheries, this being especially true of mackerel, are very uncertain. 
The cod is not a wandering fish, like the mackerel and herring ; the waters 
where it is found yield about the same number year after year. 

The theory ot the migration of fishes is one which is now causing much 
dispute among scientific men ; at present the belief is growing that the migra- 
tory instinct of fishes has been much exaggerated. At one time it was thought 
that the herring retired in winter to the Arctic Ocean, whence they migrate in 
the spring. The better opinion now seems to be that the cod move from the 
deep water, where they spend the winter, to the shallows, where they spawn in 
summer. This migration to and from -the shore, which is caused chiefly by the 
instinct that urges the fish to find suitable places for spawning, is called by some 
authorities the " bathic " migration. The mackerel and menhaden love the 
bathic migration, and also move north and south along the Atlantic coast. The 
herring is thought to love extensive migrations north and south, which are 



5 So 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 








called "littoral" migrations, and only slight bathic migrations. The question 
of fish migration, however, is still an open one, and nothing definite can be 
stated on the subject. 

Fishermen claim to have found in the course of the past winter (1891-92) 
that many fish which were supposed to migrate north and south, only retire 

to deep water and spend 
the winter there. They 
are experimenting in 
the use of nets in deep 
water ; if these experi- 
ments prove successful 
the season, which is now 
confine cl to a fe w 
m onth s, will 1 a s.t 
throughout the year, 
and the supply of fish 
be greatly increased 
and cheapened. 

The salmon go 
from the sea up the 
rivers in spring and 
early summer to spawn ; 
the manner in which 
they leap the waterfalls 
being one of the most 
marvelous feats of ani- 
mal life. It is stated 
: '■ v.'. ■ 1 mi : " 1. n i aiilln >ril \ dial 

J?HsL^*>». " a salmon will make a 

perpendicular leap of 

¥■ M u sixteen feet up through 

^ a mass of falling water ; 

sometimes, not having 
1 uuvv iNi 1 iNi leaped quite far enough, 

it will rest a moment in 
the fall and then with a vigorous slap of its tail clear the remaining distance. 
One old explanation of the salmon's wonderful leaping power says that the fish 
takes its tail in its teeth, and, springing when bent in this way, straightens itself, 
and so receives an added impetus, as does a bent wand when allowed to fly 
loose. 

The brook or speckled trout, which abound in the small lakes of Maine 



MACKEREL, HERRING, MENHADEN. 581 

and the Adirondack^, go up die brooks and inlets in the late fall to spawn. 
Being sluggish, and often pushing their way to very shallow waters, they fall 
easy victims to mink and otter. At this season the trout is protected by the 
game laws ; but in remote regions, where the law is not enforced, many are 
destroyed by men who capture them with a noose or by means of hooks 
fastened to short poles. 

The mackerel, a great wanderer, is found in almost all oceans and inland 
seas, and has always been of great importance to Europe. The European 
mackerel, a fish weighing about two pounds, appears off the English coast in 
the months of spring and summer, and is a source of great profit. As an 
article of food, the Spanish mackerel, common in the Mediterranean, is inferior 
to the other varieties. 

In spite of the uncertainty of the American mackerel fishery, it is growing 
in importance. As in the case of cod, Massachusetts and Maine lead in this 
industry. The fish called the Spanish mackerel on the American coast, unlike 
the real Spanish mackerel, is greatlv prized by epicures. 

Taking the whole world into consideration, the herring is the most import- 
ant of fishes. For centuries the Dutch led as fishermen, and the herring caught 
by these obstinate dissenters supplied the Catholic world with the means of 
fasting. Like the mackerel, the herring is a wandering fish, appearing and disap- 
pearing in vast shoals. Many superstitions are connected with this fish, and its 
sudden disappearances were attributed to most varied causes, such as cannon 
and fires on shore. The fishermen long objected to the wheels of steamboats, 
saying they drove off the herring. When taken from the water this fish dies 
quickly ; hence the expression, "dead as a herring." 

The American herring, a fish twelve to fifteen inches long, is common in 
the waters of the North Atlantic, and is also found on the Pacific coast north 
of California. Off the shore of New Brunswick they are caught every month 
in the year, which goes to disprove the migration theory. ' More attention is 
being given to American herring fisheries, and doubtless they are destined to 
become very important. 

The menhaden, a North American fish of the herring family, eight to four- 
teen inches long, is the most abundant fish on the eastern coast of the United 
States, being found from the British provinces to Chesapeake Bay. It is very 
rich and oily, and these qualities, together with the large amount of phosphorus 
it contains, make it a valuable manure. For years before menhaden were used 
for other purposes, the farmers of the New England seaboard scattered them 
over their fields ; now they are caught in large quantities for their oil, which is 
used in dressing leather. They are also of great value in the manufacture of 
fertilizers. To-day the menhaden fisheries furnish its chief industry to Eastern 
Long Island. They come in remarkably compact shoals, swimming near the 



5S2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

surface, and at night light up the sea with a phosphorescent glow. Their 
shining color makes them easily found by their enemies, the predaceous fishes ; 
bluefish are fond of them, and they are a favorite dish with the whale. As a 
bait fish it is of great importance, and it is growing in favor for food. Its 
value for oil and fertilizers is proved, and some authorities go so far as to pre- 
dict that the menhaden fisheries will in time rival those of the cod. Though 
preyed upon to such a large extent by other fishes, its numbers do not decrease. 

Another member of the herring family, which of late years has come into 
notice as a "game" fish, is the great tarpon, or tarpum, a fish found most often 
in Florida waters, where it is caught weighing two hundred pounds. 

The bluefish, which varies in weight from three to twenty pounds, and has 
been called, not unaptly, the wolf of the sea, is widely distributed, being com- 
mon in the Malay archipelago, off Australia, and in the Mediterranean. In 
American waters it roves from Brazil to Nova Scotia, following its favorite prey, 
the menhaden. It does much harm in disturbing the mackerel, menhaden, and 
herring fisheries ; each day it destroys, as is estimated, its own weight in fish ; 
when it cannot eat any more often biting and mangling like a ferocious wild 
beast. To prove its gluttony fishermen say that after once filling itself it will 
disgorge in order to kill and eat more of its victims. It attacks fish of almost 
its own size, and the trail of a school of bluefish is marked by blood and 
fragments of fish ; often when its prey is too large to swallow whole it will bite 
off and swallow the posterior half, and leave the other portion. Writers have 
likened it to a chopping-machine whose business is to cut fish to pieces, as many 
and as rapidly as possible. 

On the coasts of the Southern States and in Central and South America, 
bluefish are not eaten, but are a staple fish in the Northern markets. 

Of late years they have so grown in favor with sportsmen, that to-day they 
rank first among the game fish of the sea, holding the same place among salt 
water fishes that the salmon does among river fishes. The most popular mode 
of angling for bluefish is trolling. There is no more exhilarating sport for those 
who love the sea than a day spent off the New Jersey coast in a smart cat-boat, 
with a brisk breeze blowing, good company aboard, and the fat wolves of the 
sea following the baited hooks. There is nothing shy or modest about the blue- 
fish ; he does not need to be daintily lured and pampered, like that other favorite 
of anglers, the speckled trout. 

Undoubtedly the most important of the fresh water fish is the salmon. Not 
so long ago, this hardy fellow ruled over most of the rivers of Eastern North 
America ; but gradually he has been driven away from his favorite spawning 
streams, and now is abundant only in the waters of the Pacific seaboard. There 
he still affords sport and profit ; from the Columbia River, the great salmon 
stream, there were taken, in 1872, salmon which when preserved amounted to 



THE TRO UT FAMIL V. 583 

5,300,000 pounds. This canned salmon is exported to all parts of the 
world. 

Of the salmon trouts, near relatives of the salmon, there are three chief 
species in North America, all belonging to the West : the steel-head, the rain- 
bow, and the black spotted trout. The steel-head belongs to the Pacific 
watershed of North America, the streams of which it ascends from June to 
September ; often spending nearly the whole year inland and not returning to 
the sea till May. Full grown steel-head salmon trout average sixteen pounds. 

The rainbow salmon trout is a variety found in the streams west of the 
Sierra Nevada Mountains from old California to the British provinces ; it seldom 
exceeds five or six pounds in weight and is not a gamesome fish. 

The black spotted trout inhabits the streams of the Rocky Mountain region. 
Its size varies greatly, specimens having been caught weighing thirty pounds. 
Anglers are learning to prize this fish for its game qualities. 

The lake trout is another ally of the salmon, taking the place in the East 
of the salmon trout of the Pacific and Rocky Mountain regions. The lake trout 
abounds in the Great lakes and in the lakes of New Brunswick, Maine, and 
Northern New York. Those in the Great lakes are usually called Mackinaw 
trout and sometimes grow to weigh forty pounds; they are ravenous feeders, 
and fierce in their attacks on other fish, sometimes swallowing a fish nearly as 
large as themselves. The siscomet is a variety found only in Pake Superior. 
Neither of these fish are held in high esteem by anglers ; but in the lakes of 
Maine and the Adirondacks the lake trout, though smaller than their kindred of 
the Great lakes, are a gamesome fish, and afford an opportunity lor the display 
of all an angler's skill. They are usually caught by trolling with a metal 
"spoon," attached to a rod similar to those used for trout fly-fishing, but 
heavier. 

The member of the salmon family which is least in size, but by no means 
last in importance, at any rate, when considered from an angler's standpoint, is 
the Eastern brook or speckled trout. It is found on the Atlantic seaboard, 
being, as a rule, confined to within three hundred miles of the coast. Its south- 
ern limit is Georgia, and it is found as far north as New Foundland. 

Almost every man in the East who has had the good fortune when a boy 
to live near a trout brook knows something of the habits of these shy, swift crea- 
tures. He knows that they do not like sudden changes of temperature ; for, if 
a boy wants to find them in the hot weather he must creep up to deep, cool 
pools, under some overhanging bank or beneath a mossv half-sunk log. While 
in cooler weather, especially in the spring, he finds them hunting their food in 
the shallows where the water is warmer than in deep pools. Perhaps, too, the 
boy, if he has sharp eyes, has seen them preparing to spawn when autumn has 
come ; and he has been interested in the care shown by the mother-fish. The 



584 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

speckled trout does not distribute its eggs at random, like the coarser, more 
stupid fish ; no hen grouse takes more care in preparing her nest than does the 
mother-trout. 

These nests are in the gravel at the bottom of the brook, and she hollows 
them out with care, smoothing them with her tail, and, as it is asserted, carrying 
away obstructing pebbles in her mouth. After the eggs are laid, they are cov- 
ered with gravel and the trout proceeds to make another nest. The fish are 
said to revisit their nests every season. The spawning time begins in the late 
autumn and usually lasts about four months. 

The trout brook is a thing of joy to the boy. City anglers may come with 
elaborate tackle, but they can never rival the boy who cuts his pole in a cherry 
thicket, has a line about two feet long, and carries his bait in an old pepper 
box. He is near to nature, and the trouts, recognizing his kinship to them- 
selves, prefer to take his angle-worm rather than do anything which will land 
them in the angler's creel. Perhaps they feel more at home on the boy's 
"string" in spite of all their flopping, than they would in the sportsman's wicker 
creel. 

City fishermen may monopolize the blue-fishing and take pride in their 
nicely balanced fly-rods ; but the trout brook belongs to the country boy ; it is 
a boy's natural property, as much so as a woodchuck hole, — may it never be 
wrested from him ! 

As befits its aristocratic nature, the speckled trout is dainty rather than 
greedy in its food, and the angler has to be careful how he approaches it, and 
what bait he offers. This daintiness has been exaggerated until some fisher- 
men think they must have a different trout-fly for each week in the season. 
Most experienced anglers say that a good share of the fly-book lore is mere 
folly — something invented by dealers in sporting goods and their allies, who 
wish each fisherman to buy a large assortment of flies. On dark days a notice- 
able fly is best ; and on bright days, when the trout sees more clearly, a duller 
one, more life-like, is preferred. It is the writer's experience that, except on 
very bright, still clays, more trout will rise to a small red fly than to any other 
kind. The fly called a brown hackle is also an old time favorite. 

Fly-fishing for trout is the acme of angling ! Given a little Adirondack 
lake, half hidden by wooded peaks ; the water rippled enough to draw a curtain 
over the trout's eyes ; a guide at the paddle who knows just by what bunch of 
lily-pads a "two-pounder" is apt to rise; good serviceable fishing-tackle — given 
all these, and the man who stands in the bow and saws (not whips) the air with 
his long fly-rod ought to be happy ; nature and man are doing much for him ! 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

OUR AMERICAN LITERATKRE. 

"~T VSTEMATIC description of American literature is impossible. 
f V • < )ur best books cannot be marshaled into one phalanx. They 

^Lj# cannot be grouped wholly by time, by place, or by class dis- 
-^i • ^ /./ tinctions. They are the writings of widely different times and 
of widely different places, if not of different civilizations. ( )ur 
colonial literature bears no resemblance to that which followed 
the Revolution, and our present literature grows increasingly dif- 
ferent from either. The literature of New England and that of 
California have little in common, while the literature of the South is in no sense 
akin to that of the North. Letters have always played a subordinate part in 
American life, and have been under the influence, not of one impulse, but of 
many antagonistic impulses. ( >ur people are a heterogeneous people, and 
their books constitute a heterogeneous literature. 

In the times of the colonies, men were too busy in nation-building to 
acquire the arts of book-making. A few adventurers like the brave gasconader, 
John Smith, wrote to the Old Country, in a style forcible, but awkward and fre- 
quently incorrect, graphic and highly imaginative descriptions of the New ; a few 
painstaking diarists detailed, with a minuteness which can now please only the 
antiquarian, the daily vicissitudes of the colonists ; and, more important than 
either, a few earnest orators instilled a high-minded patriotism into their coun- 
trymen's hearts with an eloquence more remarkable for its genuineness of 
conviction and ardency of feeling than for its skill in argument or master)' of 
language. But before the Declaration of Independence America could boast 
only three men whose writings, in any way, deserve the name of literature. 
There was John Woolman, the gentle-hearted Quaker, like Izaak Walton, a 
tailor, and like him, also, a lover of man, animal, and plant. Although he was 
an irrepressible reformer, his writings have none of the pride of opinion and self- 
righteousness which are the besetting sins of reformers. Catholic, humble, 
receptive, his words are a benediction. Such Charles Lamb, the purest and 
manliest of modern English writers, found them, and as such he praised them. 
Of a very different stamp was "one Mr. Wordly-Wiseman " (as one critic has 

585 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



well called him) Benjamin Franklin. Well known abroad as a statesman, and 
still better as a scientist of the first rank, he was equally well known at home 
for his proverbial wisdom. He had a gift for putting much prudence into few 
words. His low ideals and the self-complacence which appear in his autobio- 
graphy do him little credit, but as a counselor in matters of expediency he was 
much needed by his excitable, extravagant, and often over-sanguine country- 
men. As great as either, though his writings are less enduring, was the great 
Calvinist divine, Jonathan Edwards. His doctrine 
has been largely discarded since his day, but there 
was an imaginativeness and clearness in depicting 
it, a purity of life and character behind it, and a 
devout mysticism in it, which make it elevating 
reading to-day. It is a significant fact that neither of 
these three men, neither the abolitionist, the scien- 
tist, nor the preacher, was primarily a writer. The 
greatest writers of America have always been some- 
thing more than writers. Irving and Motley were 
diplomats, Bryant was a 
journalist, Holmes a phy- 
sician, and Lowell had 
something of the states- 
man in him. All of them 
found outlets for their 
energies beyond their 
books. This circumstance 
has given to the m a 
breadth of view, a sense 
of proportion, and a manly 
reserve which wins the re- 
spect of the reader and 
instills in him self-respect, 
but it has also deprived 
them of that intensity, that 
individuality, that surcharge of meaning and emotion which makes contemporary 
English books seem at times like the scrolls ot prophets. 

It was not until after the Revolution that American literature began to take 
on distinctive national traits. Even then they came gradually. In our modes of 
thought and expression, we grew away rather than broke away from England. 
George Washington was more like an Englishman than like a modern Yankee, 
and Washington Irving, the earliest representative author of the century, was 
quite as truly a countryman of Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith as he was of the 




HAWTHORNE S BIRTHPLACE. 



POST-REVOLUTION LITER. 1 11 T RE. 587 

native American farmer or the Dutch knickerbocker. In his essays the spirit 
of the eighteenth century revived. He seemed to represent an old England 
rather than a young America. He formed his style after the models of Queen 
Anne's day and improved upon them in flexibility. Foreign readers were 
surprised to find grace and melody in an American book, and yet little has 
been written in the English language more graceful and melodious, more 
delicate in its humor, more artistic in its moods and pictures, than the " Legend 
of Sleepy Hollow." Since its day, grace has become the characteristic virtue 
of American essays. It was, however, in the rollicking extravaganza of his 
" Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York " that Irving's admirers 
thought they detected the new nation's peculiar gift to letters. Born in New 
York city, Irving had from boyhood roamed at will through its woody environs. 
Though no antiquarian, he was familiar with those details of its local history 
which could be gleaned only from the traditions ot the country-folk. With 
such unconscious training for it, he wrote his wholesome and hearty burlesque 
of the phlegmatic old Dutch ancestry of the town. There has been much 
American extravaganza since his day, but none of it, unless it be Mr. 
Stockton's fantastic tales, deserves the name of literature. Quite as American 
as either his gracefulness or his occasionally extravagant spirits was the poetic 
idealism which makes of his life of Goldsmith at once a delightful idyl and a 
delicate interpretation of character. He found a place for the imagination in 
biography, the aim of which, it must be remembered, is primarily to depict 
character, not to narrate vicissitudes. By his very idealizing he gave his readers 
a new insight into Goldsmith's heart. Though it contains some pure fiction, his 
volume has in it much poetic truth. It must be acknowledged, however, that 
Irving had no such power of impressing his own personality on his reader as 
some of even the gentlest of English writers have had. He was lacking in 
originality and personal force. But he was pre-eminently a gentleman. 
Abroad, his courtesy of manner, his kindness of heart, his thorough genuineness 
and simplicity of life made him even more welcome than his books, and his 
books were welcome everywhere. The reputation of American letters was 
soundly established abroad when the great publisher, Murray, offered him fifteen 
thousand dollars for the privilege of issuing one of his productions in England, 
and Campbell, Jeffrey — the English critic of the day, — Moore, and Scott were 
counted among his friends. The appointment of Irving as our representative 
at the Court of Madrid proved later a precedent for appointing such scholars as 
Motley, Bancroft, and Lowell as foreign Ministers. 

There was no appearance of extravaganza in any of Irving's literary con- 
temporaries in New York. Except in the "Culprit Fay" of [oseph Rodman 
Drake, there was no delicate and fanciful idealism. But all who versified, 
versified with polish. Not always flexible, seldom spirited, never very original, 



588 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



they were unexceptionably refined. They sedulously imitated classical stand- 
ards. Chaste diction, soundness of feeling, and manly reserve combined to 
make some of litx-Greene Halleck's poems perfect of their kind. His "Marco 
Bozzaris " has deservedly come down to our day, though only as a school-boy 
(lassie Even the fop of American letters, shallow, frivolous, clever Willis, 
always wrote smoothly and with an air of good breeding. The greatest repre- 
sentative of this class of poets, however, was William Cullen Bryant. He was 
born in Massachusetts, but removed to New York in 1825, when twenty-eight 
years of age, and a year later became the editor of the New York Evening 




Post. His vocabulary was limited; his poetry was frigid. To be stirred by 
it is, in the words of Lowell, "like being stirred up by the very North Pole."* 
It had little capacity for growth, and was at its best before the poet was out of 
his teens. But it had great virtues. Written in classic English, imbued with 
great dignity of thought and feeling, pervaded with what Wordsworth has 
called the "religion of the woods " — the devout and solemn reverence for the 
invisible powers of nature — its manly reserve and repose elevated not only his 
countrymen's ideals of literary excellence, but their ideals of life as well. 
While he lived, New York city, which usually values only business abilities, 

* lames Russell Lowell, " Fable for Critics." 



RECENT LITERATURE. 589 

respected his three vocations — that of the poet, that of the conscientious and 
constructive journalist, and that of the public man who never held office. This 
last vocation has been a characteristic, if not a peculiarity, of our political life. 

Although Bryant contributed no such fund of thought to American litera- 
ture as did his New England contemporaries, of whom we mean to speak later, 
his work may be taken as a type of the epoch between the Revolution and the 
Civil War. But since his prime our writers have come to a parting ot the ways 
They can no longer be at once publicists and emulators ot the English classics. 
The spirit of democracy, the influence ot the masses, is now universally felt, even 
though not universally welcomed. It is dividing our modern writers into two 
classes, the litterateurs, who enter their studies as a refuge from its noise and 
self-confident intolerance, and the popular sympathizers, who enter their studies 
as a vantage-ground from which they may further popular aims and proclaim 
popular aspirations. The iconoclastic, self-assertive, sanguine characteristics oi 
the masses appear, for instance, in the disordered rhythmic utterances ot Walt 
Whitman. The strength of his lines is their freedom ; their weakness is their 
license. Their author is virile, but not always rational. Too often he opens his 
eyes wide with amazement at mere matters of quantity and magnitude. He makes 
extravagant claims for his extravagant muse. He does not appreciate delicate 
effects and nice distinctions of thought. He has something of mob violence 
about him, but also much mob power and vehemence. He is the pioneer ami 
extreme of his class, but certain of his traits appear, scattered and incideiu.il. 
in the work of some of our recent novelists and critics. Mr. Howells' novels, for 
instance, though they are often delicate and urbane and always conscientious and 
humanitarian, are- occasionally marred by a certain aggressiveness of manner, at 
times approaching swagger, and by crude treatment of the literary lientage ot 
the past. The present generation has a great conceit of its own powers, and 
that conceit Mr. Howells does much to cultivate. It is tar too ignorant ot the 
heart thoughts of the past, and Mr. Howells has done much to make that 
ignorance complacent. But among the cultured he is a strenuous proselyter 
for popular thought, and deserves to be counted a tribune ot the people. 

( her against Mr. Howells must be set the preeminent litterateur of our 
times, Mr. Henry James. The principal characters of his novels are Anglicized 
Americans of leisure ; his principal scenes are European. He exercises in his 
readers those scholastic qualities of mind to which the great mass ot his readers 
are supremely indifferent. Both Mr. Howells and Mr. lames, however, have 
one important characteristic in common. They believe that fiction should vig 
orously reproduce and dissect the ordinary phenomena. They would use neither 
Shakespeare's dramatic power of compressing some great truth of daily life into 
little compass, nor Hawthorne's power of gaining insight into the human heart 
through the use of the supernatural. They construct their novels according to 



59° 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



an earnest, scientific theory, and so occasionally pain and perplex the reader 
with problems for which they offer no solution. They are attempting to accli- 
matize in American letters foreign methods ; already they have not a few disci- 
ples, but whether they will finally succeed or not is still an open question. 

Superior to both Mr. Howells and Mr. James in versatility, in creative 
power, in catholicity of sympathy, and in insight into the basal principles of art 
and of human nature is the novelist, Mr. F. Marion Crawford, though he is their 
inferior in conscientiousness of purpose, in evenness of execution, and in deli- 
cacy of expression. Mr. Crawford is cosmopolitan. There is hardly a country 
of importance that has not furnished him with a scene for a novel, and of every 
country he gives a view from within. It is the secret, however, both of Mr. 

Crawford's power and of his limitations 
that he is unique and stands outside the 
line of our literary development. He is 
in no sense a typical American novelist. 
Neither the democratic movement nor the 
aristocratic reaction measurably affects him. 
A class even more free from the influence 
of either current survives in such writers 
as "Ike Marvel," Charles Dudley Warner, 
and George William Curtis, who belong 
to an older school of American essayists 
and have the courtly graces of Irving with 
the practical interests of Steele and Addi- 
son. Roughly speaking, however, Ameri- 
can literature may be divided into three 
periods, the colonial, the classic, and the 
modern ; and this last period is marked by 
two contradictory forces, aggressive democ- 
racy on the one hand and the appearance of caste-spirit on the other. 

Thus far we have treated chiefly of the literature of New York, for it is the 
least provincial, and therefore, in a sense, the most representative of the nation 
at large. The so-called Empire State, however, has played but a small part in 
American letters as compared with New England. Our greatest novelist, 
Hawthorne ; our greatest orator, Webster, and our greatest essayists, historians, 
and poets, are all New Englanders. The literature of Massachusetts and its 
adjacent States has a flavor of its own. It is always provincial, often narrow, 
occasionally fanatical, occasionally patronizing, but its voice is always the voice 
of conscience. It is preeminently the literature of the Puritan. Its Webster 
and its Wendell Phillips appeal to the sense of justice in their hearers and to 
that strenuous desire to maintain their individual responsibilities which is the 




WHITTIER— LOWELL. 591 

New Englander's idea of liberty. Its Prescott and Motley trace not the 
material, but the moral progress of the peoples whose development they 
chronicle. Its Hawthorne dramatizes the deepest problem of the conscience 
The themes of its Emerson are always of natural religion. Its Longfellow, 
Lowell, and Whittier look almost exclusively on the moral aspects of even litera- 
ture and romance. There is " no art for art's sake" in Massachusetts. We 
can never "escape from the diocese of a strict conscience." No book furnishes 
mere amusement or recreation. The sense of duty sometimes inspires the New 
Englander with eloquence, sometimes elicits the beauties of mystical imagina- 
tion sometimes presents itself in a play of wit, as in the Biglow Papers of 
James Russell Lowell, sometimes is made almost winsome, as in the poems of 
Longfellow, but it is never totally forgotten. 

New Englander of New Englanders is the Quaker poet of Massachusetts, 
John Greenleaf Whittier. Although not a Puritan, he is the most typical of 
the- New England poets. His early life was that of a tanner's boy, and his 
poems are full of farm scenes and homestead incidents. His "Snow Bound" 
pictures the cheer within and the cold without of a New England winter. He 
makes graphic the sturdy qualities of the old New England settlers. The 
reminiscences of his early days, picturing, as they do, a stalwart human nature, 
confirm the conscience of his readers against present temptations. His rhymes 
are often faulty, his metre sometimes rough, his spirit too surcharged with local 
feeling to be called national, his verse falls just short of inspiration, but what 
he has added to the moral worth of American letters is invaluable. He has 
given to American poetry a dignity of its own — the dignity of unaffected but 
undaunted manhood. A poet of conscience, courage, and fervor is sure to 
do earnest work in the world, and Whittier was among the first to throw himself 
into the anti-slavery cause. His anti-slavery poems, Quaker though he is, ring 
with a martial vigor. He has never made any peace with sin. Yet with all 
his warmth of temperament, often waxing hot with indignation, he has also 
that benignity, that gentleness, that purity of motive, that sense of peace which 
belong to the disciples of the " Society of Friends." He is the representa- 
tive poet of his fellow Christians as well as of his State. His poems breathe 
the religious spirit. 

The anti-slavery cause hail an advocate of a very different temperament, 
but quite as earnest and quite as poetic, in fames Russell Lowell. It was the 
love of letters, not the love of the muse, which first started him on his literary career. 
He was in his early tastes primarily a critic. To careless readers his earliest 
poems seemed the work of a dainty and graceful amateur, and gave no promise 
of his future powers. His gift of criticism, his love of verbal by-play, his enjoy- 
ment and mastery of the lighter veins in literature he did not lose as he grew 
older, and showed his ability as well to encounter the dangers and responsibilities 



592 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of active American citizenship and energetic public life. He was the most 
scholarly and most original of American critics to the end. Familiar with all the 
literatures of Europe, ancient and modern, at home in all the by-paths of English 
letters, he was yet no pedant and no traditionalist. He seemed to enter as an 
equal the Elysium of the poets. He was so keen and appreciative an observer 
of every aspect of nature that Charles Darwin said that he was born to be a 
naturalist. He was so alive to the world of to-day, that another friend early 
prophesied of him that "he would never dally with his muse when he could 
invite her aid in the cause of the oppressed and suffering." His literary essays 
revivified whatever they touched upon, because they themselves were vital with 
the modern spirit. His earnestness never prevented him from enjoying the 

quaint charms of the past. He would not 
have been so great a critic, however, had 
he not been much more than a critic. 
Even though his powers of execution were 
not equal to his powers of conception, he 
was a genuine poet. " He has the eye 
and mind of a poet," says one critic, "but 
wants the plastic touch which turns to 
shape the forms of things unknown." In 
his verse there was much poetry, though it 
was often in the rough. He was some- 
times careless. He was sometimes so 
clever as to seem forced, and he was 
sometimes forced without being at all 
clever. But his "Commemoration Ode," 
his "Cathedral," and his " Vision of Sir 
Launfal," not to mention many minor 
poems, are full of poetic beauty and strong 
with poetic truth. It was the shame of slavery, however, that kindled his 
powers into flame. It was characteristic of his Yankee blood that he used not 
mere argument as his weapon, but wit and conscience fused by his hot indigna- 
tion into a blade as keen as Damascus steel. His " Biglow Papers" are the 
keenest, the most racial, the most national of all American satires. The first of 
them appeared in 1X46. In its Yankee hero, concealing not one drop of his 
Yankee blood, abating not one jot of his Yankee pride or Yankee manners, and 
softening by not one touch his Yankee wit, appeared a new figure in American 
life. It was a figure around which the Puritan elements of the community could 
rally. Powell had awakened the dormant conscience of the nation. He fiercely 
ridiculed the hypocrisies and glossed-over selfishness of the slave-power and the 
still more contemptible cowardice of the silent and the "prudent" in the North. 




r. WHITMAN 



LONGFELLOW. 593 

He fairly defied ridicule in return, for what the drawl and dialect of his hero could 
not make ridiculous nothing could make ridiculous. To-day its wit still retains 
its freshness, and its satire of pretentiousness, demagogy, and false standards 
of honor in American politics has unfortunately not lost its seasonableness. His 
"Fable for Critics," a running comment of clever, good-natured, unfinished 
epigrams on his literary contemporaries, showed Lowell to be a wit, but his 
" Biglow Papers" showed him to be a genius and not a little of a statesman. 
In the words of George William Curtis, literature was Lowell's pursuit, but 
patriotism was his passion. He was the more patriotic that he never fought 
over old battles. He was too busy fighting new ones for that. Sent as our 
Minister to England, he represented us abroad courteously but unswervingly, 
nor concealed for a moment his faith in the republican constitution and 
democratic principles of his native country. If occasionally a democratic self- 
assertiveness mars the general dignity of his writings, it marks him as the more 
typically a modern American. No other writer represents so many and so 
varied phases of American life as does this wit, gentleman, publicist, critic, 
scholar, and poet. 

LONGFELLOW. 

More representative of American poetry, though not of American life, than 
Lowell, and more national than Whittier, and more popular than either, is our 
household poet, Longfellow. Originality of thought has not been a notable 
characteristic of American poetry, and Longfellow was not markedly original. 
But what he lacked in originality he supplied with scholarship. He was versed in 
both the Norse and the Romance languages and literatures. His mind was 
stored with poetic traditions. He popularized the literary heritage of Europe. 
Clearness of thought, precise perception, transparent expression, that definiteness 
and accuracy which give force, have not been notable characteristics of Amer- 
ican poetry, and Longfellow often wrote vaguely because he saw vaguely. At 
times he lacked definite meaning, though the sense of the hearers is dulled to 
the loss by the pleasant sound oi his verse. But his words are always gracious, 
gentle, manly, unsophisticated, melodious, and full of catholicity and content- 
ment. They are written to comfort the sorrowing, to give courage to the toil- 
ing, or to add happiness to the youthful. The moods which he evolves from his 
readers are tranquil, innocent, reverent, purifying. American readers, living as 
they do in the stress of competition, with little in their lives to give rest to their 
eyes or satisfaction to their a-sthetic nature, turn to poetry not so much for 
truths as for beauty. Since life furnishes them with vigor, but with little that is 
delicate or graceful, they treasure most in poetry, ease, dignity, simplicity, 
chasteness of diction, the quiet flow of sound on sound and mood on 
mood. Such qualities they find in this scholarly laureate of the people. Though 
Longfellow is the favorite poet of young girlhood, womanhood and the home, 
38 



594 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



there is no sentimentality and no melancholy in his personality. His pastorals 
are full of picturesque figures of speech, and are imbued with a love of nature 
and a genial love of man. The poet has done much to create among his coun- 
trymen a love of European literature and to instill the beginnings of what may 
prove a mellowing culture, while, in his Hiawatha and Evangeline, he has given 
to the world two classics, distinctively American. 

There is a certain barrenness to the eye in plain American life, which we 
lose sight of when enjoying the scholarship and poetic imaginations of Long- 
fellow. The same sense of barrenness, his friend and contemporary, Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, the "philosopher of Concord," relieves in a characteristically 
different way. He gratifies and charms his readers with the beauties of an 

idealistic, vague and pantheistic philo- 
sophy, surcharged with his own poetic and 
imaginative individuality. His idealism 
was often curiously inappropriate to his 
circumstances and surroundings. There 
was an impervious self-complacence in his 
writings which gave to them that gravity 
and that appearance of wisdom and author- 
ity which are characteristic of the Oriental 
seer. He was sometimes superficial, but 
never flippant. He never argued ; he 
never even unfolded truths ; he formu- 
lated and declared ex cathedra dogmas, 
and gathered together, without sequence 
or system, a number of apposite apoth- 
egms in a single theme. In common with 
Longfellow, he was often led to say what 
sounded well and meant little, but unlike 
Longfellow he was seldom commonplace at once in manner and matter. 
Although no writer is in reality more provincial than Emerson, no writer 
has such a semblance of superiority to all prejudices of race, nation, religion 
and home training as he. But if there was much that was factitious in Emer- 
son, there was also much that was genuine. He had at times an illuminating 
insight into the heart. His essays are elevating and suggestive. He was 
gifted with great powers of imagination. His severity had its source in his inner- 
most character, and was more effectual against the storms of life than was the 
stoicism of the Romans, or the light-headedness of the Greeks. He was so free 
from all worldliness in motives or in tastes that he seemed immaculate. He had 
that courage in his faiths which only purity can give. He lived as in another 
world. If not quite the seer he purports to be, he was unquestionably a genius. 




HAWTHORNE— MINOR NOVELISTS. 595 

But far greater in genius than the idealist Emerson was the mystic and 
recluse, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His actual life was of the simplest. He was 
born in quaint Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804; he graduated from Bowdoin 
College, held in the course of his career two political offices, shunned publicity 
and wrote novels which met at the time with no remarkable sale. But from this 
simple career came the wierdest, most imaginative and most profound tales in 
American, if not in all Anglo-Saxon literature. His novels are essentially 
Puritan. Their scenes, their men and women, their weird traditions, their 
sombre creeds are unmistakably native to New England, though to a New 
England under the spell of the supernatural. In his own neighborhood, he 
found enough to feed his love of antiquity and of the legendary. His novels 
imbue the reader with a reverential awe for the Puritan fathers. No cavalier in 
Scott's novels ever seemed more romantic than do the stern and gloomy 
Calvinists of the " Scarlet Letter " and the " House of Seven Gables." Tales 
of witchcraft, of ill-starred lovers, of hereditary taints, of sin and its awful 
consequences, fascinated Hawthorne, and under his artistry became often 
fantastic, occasionally morbid, but always impressive. Never avoiding 
provincialism, he was always something more than provincial, for his themes 
dealt with human problems of universal significance. Unlike most mystics 
his style was transparently clear and exceedingly graceful. In those delicate, 
varied and impalpable but permanent effects which are gained by a happy 
arrangement of words in their sentences, no modern writer surpasses him, while 
no American writer equals him in that unerring directness and unswerving 
force which come from the exact use of words. To the rhetorician, his style is 
a study ; to the lay reader a delight that eludes analysis. There is also much 
humor and satire in Hawthorne, so delicate as to escape the observation of the 
careless and the obtuse. 

minor novelists. 

That the love of mystery, which found its perfect expansion in Hawthorne, 
was something of a national art, not merely a personal trait, is evident after 
reading the crude, but effective and highly original tales of our first American 
novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote impossible but impassioned 
stories of the supernatural and pseudo-supernatural. Edgar Allan Poe, a much 
better known writer of the same school, delighted in working out the horrible 
fancies of his brain in graphic and often artistic forms. His tales suffer, how- 
ever, from their total lack of moral substance. It is a significant fact, testifying, 
possibly to the sense of freedom and therefore the contentment which our national 
writers feel, that Poe was the only American author of any prominence to wreck 
his happiness and his character from sheer perversity and love of extravagance. 
He was the only one in this country to fling himself, as did Marlowe. Byron, and 
many others in England, so willfully against the conventional standards of his 



596 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



environment as to destroy himself. His plots are so sensational and his dra- 
matic efforts so bold and unnatural that we seldom give their author sufficient 
credit for his polished and careful workmanship. Though there was a certain 
tlashiness in his art which cheapens it, he was both an artist and a genius. 
"There comes Poe," says Lowell, in his " Fable for Critics," 

" With his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, 

Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge." 

A romancist of a very different type was James Fenimore Cooper, some- 
times diffuse and sometimes stilted, but more frequently an exciting narrator of 
Indian tales and pioneer adventures. The power of his stories is due not to any 

noticeable gifts of style or to any 
remarkable originality or profundity 
of thought, but to the wild prairie 
life or as wild sea life which they 
minutely depict, and to the roman- 
tic types of Indian, trapper and 
sailor, which they have created. 
They are written in an honest, 
hearty and patriotic spirit, and the 
"Spy," the "Pilot." and the 
" Leather-Stocking Tales " are still 
the delight of boys. Manly tales 
of pure adventure are rare in 
American literature. Our romance 
is usually didactic, sentimental, 
supernatural or retrospective. Di- 
dactic romance has attained its best 
expression and gained the greatest 
results in the " Uncle Tom's Cabin," 
of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe — a tale full of dramatic situations, written with 
Yankee directness and Puritan sympathy for the oppressed, and by its very bias 
and idealism of invaluable service to the anti-Slavery cause. Pathetic romance 
is best typified by the Romona of Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson — a tale full of 
poetic insight as well as of poetic beautv, in behalf of the Indian. Its author 
is the greatest representative of a large school of modern writers, characterized 
by extreme sensitiveness, artistic perception, poetic aspirations and a somewhat 
sentimental but a very genuine love for the suffering and the oppressed. Their 
chief fault is, that while they soften the heart they never invigorate the will. 

It is to the South that we must turn for the best examples of retrospective 
romance. Idealizing has always been the Southerner's peculiar gift ; in the com- 




LOUISA M\Y AI.COTT. 
' a Photograph by Notman, Boston.) 



THE LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH AND WEST. 597 

paratively successful clays before the war, it usually ran into bombast and grand- 
iloquence, but the disasters of invasion and conquest have subdued it to the 
pastoral, the pathetic, the retrospective. In the days of slavery politics absorbed 
all the best energies and intellect of the South, but since the days of reconstruc- 
tion, more than one Southerner of promise has found in literature an attractive 
career. In a number of short dialect stories of plantation days, as well as in the 
tender, musical, visionary poems of Sidney Lanier, the South has contributed 
new and artistic elements to American literature. Indeed, the South is the home 
of our most characteristic short stories. The typical Southerner is still imbued 
with an intense local patriotism. Every village under his native skies is a little 
world to him. He finds compacted within its narrow limits many a theme for a 
brief romance, full of human interest. The romance of its vicissitudes in war, 
the romance of its love scenes — where love is still looked upon as the grand 
passion — the pathos of the disasters it suffered in the South's defeat, and the 
quaint humor of its colored folk, make a union of elements favorable to the 
story-teller's art. The South has produced at least two authors to do justice to 
these gifts of circumstance. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page depicts in his pages 
the South before the war. Under his hand, an idealizing regret beautifies the 
past till it seems a golden age. A half vicarious boastfulness, a meagre 
achievement and a genuine poetic aspiration blend in the true Southerner's tem- 
perament. Mr. Page has nothing of the boastfulness ; he seldom, if ever, 
depicts the meagre externals, but he does exquisite justice to the poetic aspira- 
tions of his countrymen. His tales are pathetic, romantic, picturesque, catholic, 
and toward both races sympathetic and appreciative. Of very different tem- 
perament is his compeer, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris. Mr. Harris's sketches are 
artistically true, not, as is the case with Mr. Page, because they reveal the aspi- 
rations of the old-time Southern temperament, but because of their author's 
alert observations of life as it is. He is alive with a vitality which makes for 
cheerfulness, quickness, deftness, appreciativeness. Though he deals with a 
passing, if not a past, civilization, he looks back to it neither regretfully, nor 
inimically, nor indifferently. He even goes to it for invigoration. Though there 
is pathos in his stories, they are full of hope and freshness of life. On the one 
hand he does not touch such deep chords as does Mr. Page ; on the other, he 
is more vivacious and stimulating. 

Successful studies in provincial life, however, are not limited to the South. 
Every distinctive region in the United States can claim its distinctive literature. 
To-day Miss Wilkins and Miss [ewett, of a decade or so ago, Saxe Holme, and 
to go back much earlier, Hawthorne, are the names which naturally occur to us, 
when we turn to New England. Of these, Miss Wilkins' painstaking and often 
painfully conscientious sketches are the most trustworthy, though not always 
the pleasantest depictions of Puritan manners, customs, and habits of utter- 



59§ 



THE STORY OF AMRRWA. 



ante. Xot only to the meagre, rigid and self-repressive lives of these 
village Calvinists, but as well to their earnest purposes, their loyal consecra- 
tion to duty and their genuine reverence for the home, the church and the 
state, Miss Wilkins is just. Her studies — stories they can hardly he called — 
are perhaps works ot science rather than works of art, but in either case, they 
are literature. 

That cosmopolitan New York should furnish material for the same scien- 
tific stuch' in provincialism would seem to involve a contradiction in terms. Yet 







•' 



WlUTl'lhR 5 BIRTHPLACE. 



that city has an individuality of its own, difficult as it is to depict. Mr. Janvier 
has done something for its art studios and its French colonies. Mr. Howells, 
in his ■•Hazard of New Fortunes," has done something for its streets and 
houses, but it is to Mr. Hamlin Garland and to Mr. Richard Harding Davis 
that we an- indebted for the introduction of typical .Yew Yorkers to Ameri- 
can readers. Bach, in his different view, gives a hint of the literary possibil- 
ities to be found in what has heretofore seemed commonplace Xew York. In 
Mr. Eugene Field's grotesque commingling of Xew England reminiscence, the 
love of exaggeration to be found all over the western plains, and the quips of 



AMERICAN HUMOR— AMERICAN HISTORIANS. 599 

humor and turns of tenderness which arc closely associated with the Pacific 
coast, we find writing appropriate to Chicago, while further west, Arkansas 
hnds utterance: in the sympathetic studies oi Octan Thauet. The early min- 
ing excitement of the Californian coast had its own peculiar literature 
in the racy sketches of Bret llarte — a skillful pupil of Dickens in his 
mingled humor and pathos, grotesqueness and idealism, and in his depiction oi 
acts of gentleness in lives of hardship. I lis pictures oi mining-life, however, 
have in them an originality which makes him something more than .1 mere 
pupil. He has made a distinct, though a provincial contribution to letters. 

Outside ot these sketches there is little genuine humor in American litera- 
ture. We have many writers oi extravagant burlesque ; we have in Dr. < )liver 
Wendell Holmes a kindly, brilliant, scintillating, suggestive wit ; but we can 
find nowhere in American letters that delicate and quizzical self-revelation, that 
pathetic oddness, those fantastically expressed confidences, those self amused 
idiosyncracies which constitute humor and which flavored the conversations oi 
Abraham Lincoln. There is a reserve in American writers which prevents such 
humor. To find it we must go to the English Charles Lamb, Thomas Fuller, 
and Sir Thomas Browne. Few nations, however, have produced any wittier 
books than Dr. Holmes' Breakfast Table Series, or more laughable extrava- 
gances than Mark Twain's, while more quiet and more graceful, though less 
original than either, are the shorter sketches of Charles I )udley Warner and 
"Ike Marvel.'' 

Scientific observation and poetic insight united in Thoreau to give him a 
familiar acquaintance with the shy beauties ot nature. I lis writings are marred 
by infelicities and affectations in expression, but they are the work of a genuine 
lover and interpreter of the woods and streams. I le is the master in a school 
which includes an increasing number of writers every decade. 

At least those American historians, Prescott, Larkman, and Motley, have 
gained a transatlantic reputation for the eloquence of their style, the beauty of 
their description, and the artistic power of their presentations of historic 
movements. All three were careful scholars, though idealists, vigorous, and 
clear writers, and sanguine Americans. To those at all seriously inclined their 
histories are as absorbing as fiction, and, if too enthusiastic to be accurate in 
all their details, are unquestionably true in general outline. The) have made 
use of the imagination as an aid to scholarship, not as a substitute for it. and 
they have used it chiefly, if not solely, to elucidate truth. 

1 here is nothing in oratory more profoundly eloquent than the two addresses 
of Abraham Lincoln on the field of Gettysburg. They are the simple and 
devout expressions of a national patriotism, purged of all worldly passion. The 
chasteness, the harmony, the marvelous beauty of their language is, however, 
forgotten in the sublimer beauty of their thought and spirit. They are so sat red 



6oo 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 




to something higher than literature that we never think of them as literature. 
The clear and animating orations of the chivalric, visionary Wendell Phillips 
deserve a passing mention for their beauty of form and transparency of 
argument. But our one great orator is the Whig statesman, Daniel Webster. 
He was educated in New Hampshire, under that vigorous discipline which only 
the hardships of poverty can give, and showed the value of his training in the 
stalwartness of his after-life, when he stood for a conscientious adherence to the 

Union and to the Constitution 
liberally interpreted. To this 
day, his sonorous, significant, 
and impressive utterances 
must be studied for any 
thorough appreciation of the 
responsibilities of American 
citizenship and the genius of 
American institutions. By 
his inherent dignity he long 
maintained against the en- 
croachments of the modern 
politician our forefathers' 
standard of dignity in Ameri- 
can public lile. Unquestion- 
ably the inferior of the great 
English statesman, Edmund 
Burke, in beauties of imagi- 
nation, precision and incisive- 
ness of language, and in 
profundity of statesmanship, 
he was at least more smooth. 
more even, and more self- 
controlled. 
The contrast between the two well illustrates the contrast between 
England and America in every department of literature. The typical English 
writer shows the greater mastery of the powers and striking beauties of 
language. The American is the smoother and the more polished. The 
English is the more intense, and the more self-expressive, and the more 
powerful ; the American the more guarded and the more contented. America 
has produced as yet no literature comparable to the greater classics of England, 
but she has produced much worthy to be found in every Anglo-Saxon house- 
hold, and capable of cheering and strengthening in his work and hardships 
every Anglo-Saxon reader. 




WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 
a Photograph by Sarony, New 




CHAPTER XXXIV. 

NEWSPAPERS AND JOURNALISM. 

HERE are, a latter-day philosopher has said, no such things as 
inventions ; all we have are discoveries. Without dwelling upon 
the identity of the two terms, it may be added that nearly all our 
modern arts and sciences are not even discoveries, but mere evo- 
lutions. Away back in antiquity, perhaps among the cave-dwell- 
ers, men observed certain facts and practically applied them to 
the satisfaction of their needs. And the bulk of human progress 
in all the centuries since has been chiefly development and elaboration of those 
primitive ideas. It is really startling to notice how many fundamental princi- 
ples, of architecture, of engineering, of mechanics, date back to or before the 
earliest historic times ; and to notice, moreover, how largely the really new dis- 
coveries have been utilized only in application to ancient processes. The steam 
engine, for example, is a modern device. Yet it scarcely gives us one new pro- 
cess, but is harnessed to the work that was formerly done by wind or water, or 
brute or man. The steamship is an evolution from the galley, the railroad train 
from the ox-cart. The Springfield rifle and the Krupp gun are only new means 
for doing the same old work that was done by the "cloth-yard shaft" and the 
catapult." Modern improvements" is a literally accurate term. 

Some few features of nineteenth century civilization, however, are alto- 
gether new, and have not even a prototype in ancient history. And among 
these, perhaps, the most conspicuous is the newspaper. If printing itself be 
only a development of the old idea of writing and engraving, the newspaper 
still stands unique. Neither in the posted bulletin nor in the herald's proclama- 
tion can we find a trace of the essential idea of the modern journal ; nor in any 
other feature of ancient life. The newspaper belongs, both in spirit and in 
substance, to the modern world. Nor can this fact be made more evident, and 
the necessitous value of the thing be made more apparent, than by imagining 
ourselves suddenly and entirely deprived of it. Were the steamship and rail- 
road abolished, we could still get on with the sailing-ship and stage-coach ; with- 
out the telegraph, we could still depend upon the mails ; with no electric lamps 
or gas, we could make use of oil or candles ; without steam-power, we could 

60 1 



602 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

employ the earlier and simpler motor-forces. But were the newspaper swept 
out of existence, absolutely nothing would be left to take its place, in kind or in 
degree : and it seems not extravagant to say that its absence would be more 
keenly felt than that of almost any, and perhaps of any, other device of modern 
ingenuity. 

Well did Jefferson say, "I would rather live in a country with newspapers 
and without a government, than in a country with a government but without 
newspapers;" and Bonaparte: "Four hostile newspapers are more to be 
dreaded than a hundred thousand bayonets." 

It is beyond the purpose of this essay to review the whole history of the 
printing art, from the Chinese blacksmith, Pi Ching, in 1041, and Gutenberg and 
Schoeffer four hundred years later ; an art that at the discovery of America 
was still regarded as somewhat akin to sorcery. Nor can we even summarize 
the record of the newspaper press of the world, with its uncertain origin. Apart 
from the Pekin Gazette, the Chinese Government organ, said to have been 
founded about 1 200, there are varying claims for priority in newspaper work. 
About 1240, the Venetian Government issued its famous Gazette, but this was 
merely a series of manuscript war bulletins, scarcely to be reckoned as a news- 
paper. There is a legend of a printed journal at Nuremberg in 1457. but 
scarcely authenticated. In much dispute, also, is the story of the English Mer- 
cury, said to have been founded by Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burleigh, in 
1 588, to disseminate true tidings of the Spanish war, though it seems certain 
that such an occasional printed bulletin, at least, was issued. But the first real 
journal published in Europe was probably Die Frankfurter Oberpostamts 
Zeitung, a daily, founded in 161 5 and still in existence. The first English news- 
paper appeared on October 9, 1621, when Nathaniel Butter, of London, began 
publishing his Courant ; on May 23, 1622, Thomas Archer and Nicholas Bourne 
first issued their Weekly News ; and on August 23 of the same year Butter 
gave to the public his Certain News of the Present Week. It is interesting to 
observe, from these dates, that the origin of the English newspaper press and 
the foundation of the New England colonies were practically simultaneous. Our 
task now is to trace the progress of the press in the great nation of which these 
colonies were the germ. 

The Massachusetts settlers were the first to introduce the printer's art into 
North America, though Mendoza had set up a press in Mexico in 1535. It was 
in 1639 that printing was begun at Cambridge, Massachusetts. The year be- 
fore, Jesse Glover, an English clergyman, had reverently packed up press and 
types and set sail with them for the colony. He died on the voyage ; but the 
precious freight reached its destination and was unpacked and set up in the 
house of Nathaniel Eaton, the head of the famous school founded by John Har- 
vard. There American literature had its birth. 



THE EARLY NEWSPAPERS. 



603 



The first attempt to publish a newspaper was made by Benjamin Harris, in 
Boston. On September 25, 1690, he issued, from the press of Richard Pierce, a 
paper called Public Occurrences, both Foreign and Domestic. It was a sheet 
fourteen by twenty-two inches in size, folded into four pages, with two columns 
to a page, and with the fourth page blank. Only one number, however, came 
out, the Government forbidding a second issue. More fortunate was the next 
attempt, also in Boston, in 1704. On Monday, April 24, Bartholomew Green 
began printing The Boston News Letter, and Nicholas Boone began selling it at 
his shop. It was a sheet of coarse paper, eight by twelve inches in size, not 
folded, with two columns on each of the two pages. Chief Justice Sewall had 
the historic honor of taking the first copy from the press. There was just one 
advertisement in that initial number, its own, and it read as follows : — 

"This News-Letter is to be continued Weekly ; and all persons who have 
any Houses, Lands, Tenements, Farms, Ships. Vessels, Goods, Wares, or 
Merchandise, etc., to be Sold or Let; or Servants, Runaway, or Goods Stole or 
Lost ; may have the same inserted at a Reasonable 
Rate, from Twelve Pence to Five Shillings, and not 
to exceed : Who may agree with John Campbell, 
Postmaster of Boston. All persons in Town or 
Country may have the News-Letter every Week, 
Yearly, upon reasonable terms, agreeing with John 
Campbell, Postmaster, for the same." 

This journal endured for seventy-two years. 
Bartholomew Green, the printer, succeeded Camp- 
bell as proprietor in 1722; he was succeeded by 
his son-in-law, John Draper, in 1733, and he by his 

son, Richard Draper, in 1762. The last-named changed its title to The Weekly 
News Letter and New England Chronicle; then to The Massachusetts Gazette 
and Boston News Letter ; then, in 1768, united it with The Boston Post-Boy ; 
and finally, in 1769, restored the original name. Its publication ceased in 
March, 1776. Its rival, The Boston Gazette, was started on December 21, 
1 719, and some years later was printed by James Franklin, elder brother of 
Benjamin Franklin, of whom we shall presently hear much more. The Gazette 
died in 1752. The third American paper appeared one day after the second, 
on December 22, 1 7 1 9. It was The America!/ Weekly Mercury, issued by 
Andrew Bradford, in Philadelphia. The fourth was The New England Couraut, 
brought out by James Franklin, at Boston, on August 7, 172 1. Its aggressive 
tone kept it in a state of warfare with the Government, and it died in 1727. 
James Franklin then went to Rhode Island in quest of greater liberty — as Roger 
Williams had done — and started The Gazette, at Newport, in 1732. 

New York's first paper was The New York Gazette, issued by the illustrious 




6o 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

William Bradford on October 23, 1725. Boston's fourth paper, The New 
England Weekly Journal, appeared on March 20, 1727, and enjoyed the edi- 
torial inspiration of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. The Alary- 
laud Gazette appeared at Annapolis in 1727. The South Carolina Gazette at 
Charleston, in 1731, and The Virginia Gazette at Williamsburg, in 1736. The 
first American paper in a foreign language was a German journal printed at 
Germantown, Pa., in 1739. 

The first libel suit in the history of American journalism occurred in 1734- 
35, and commands our interested attention. John Peter Zenger, who had been 
in the employ of William Bradford, began on November 5, 1733, publishing 
The New York Weekly Journal as a rival to Bradford's New York Gazette. 
It became the organ of the political party opposed to the Colonial Government, 
and was vigorous and outspoken in its criticisms. This warfare culminated, on 
November 17, 1734. in Zenger's arrest on the charge of libel. The eloquent 
Andrew Hamilton, of Philadelphia, was engaged to defend him, and a most 
exciting and impressive trial ensued. Finally, in August, 1735, Zenger was 
triumphantly acquitted. He and Hamilton were loaded with honors by the 
sympathetic public, and the principle of the freedom of the press was estab- 
lished. 

Reference has already been made to Benjamin Franklin, who was preemi- 
nently the most commanding figure in American journalism in the last century. 
He was born in Boston in 1706 and died in 1790, and his history, as a patriot, 
diplomat, statesman, moralist, and man of letters, is familiar to the world. His 
first work was clone for his brother, in Boston. He soon, however, made his 
way to Philadelphia, entering that city a penniless young man. For a time he 
worked for Bradford and for Samuel Keimer. The latter had a paper called 
The Universal Instructor in All the Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette, 
which languished on the verge of dissolution. He sold it in 1729, to Franklin, 
who at once reduced its portentous title to The Pennsylvania Gazette, and in- 
stilled into it so much editorial vigor that it quickly became the most noteworthy 
and most noted journal in America. Scholarly, enterprising, and progressive, 
Franklin did more than any and all of his contemporaries for the advancement 
of journalism and of printing in general, and has ever been fittingly regarded as 
the "patron saint " of typography in America. 

Patriotism early found voice in the press. At the beginning of 1 74S The 
Independent Advertiser, of Boston, spoke boldly for freedom from British rule, 
and its printer, Daniel Fowle, was imprisoned therefor, though the writers of 
the revolutionary articles, Samuel Adams and Jonathan Mayhew, escaped. On 
regaining his liberty Fowle went to Portsmouth, and in 1756 founded The New 
Hampshire Gazette. Isaiah Thomas, of Worcester, Mass., on May 3, 1774, 
began publishing a revolutionary sheet. So Whig papers were started in many 



FAMOUS EDITORS. 605 

places throughout the colonies, and gave incalculable aid to the cause of Ameri- 
can Independence. The Hartford Courant dates from 1764, The New Haven 
Journal from 1767, The Salem Gazette from 1768, The Worcester Spy from 1770, 
The Baltimore American from 1773, and The Americam Advertiser, of Philadel- 
phia, the first daily in the country, from 1784. We may close the record of the 
colonial and revolutionary press with the statement that in 1789, in the whole 
United States, the gross number of papers printed every month was 298,000. 
In later years the daily issue of a single journal has exceeded those figures ! 

With the beginning of our national lite, territorial expansion and industrial 
growth set in at an amazing pace, and the multiplication of newspapers did not 
lag behind. In 1S10 the State of New York had sixty-six papers, fourteen of 
them being in New York city. Of the latter, two are still in existence. The 
Commercial Advertiser, founded in 1794, and The Evening Post, 1801. In 1827 
'The Journal of Commerce was started in that city, and it is still published. The 
Courier and Enquirer appeared in the same year, and, after running a brilliant 
course under the editorship of James Watson Webb, was merged into The 
World when that paper, was established, in 1S60. In 1833 The Sun was started, 
in 1835 The Herald, in 1841 The Tribune, and in 1S51 The 'Times, thus estab- 
lishing the present era in metropolitan journalism. The simple mention of 
these papers recalls the entire history of the past half century, starred with a 
galaxy of illustrious names. When newspapers were first issued in England 
they were the object of all the scorn and contempt that literary men could pour 
upon them. Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and others made them the target for their 
most envenomed shafts. But now the foremost men of letters were glad to seek 
the favor of the press, to contribute to its columns, to be known as editors. 
The name of William Cullen Bryant is only one on a long roll of the best in 
American literature, of men and women who have been identified with the 
newspaper press, and to it have given the best efforts of their lives. 

In the past generation of editors, it is not invidious to say, two great 
names stand forth preeminent. They are those of James Gordon Bennett and 
Horace Greeley, the founders and editors respectively of The New York 
Herald And The New York Tribune. The former was the incarnation of the 
news-gathering instinct. He sought to make his paper the completest possible 
record of daily events in all parts of the globe. His reporters and corres- 
pondents seemed literally ubiquitous. No labor or expense was spared in 
getting the fullest possible accounts of every event, at the earliest possible 
moment, and in placing it before the readers of The Herald in the most attract- 
ive, and often most sensational, form. The ruling passion of the great man, 
and the dominant note of his great organ, was " News ! News ! News !" Gree- 
ley was in many respects the antithesis of Bennett. Coming to New York a 
penniless youth, strikingly like Franklin in Philadelphia, he worked as a jour- 



606 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

neyman printer until he was able, on a most meagre capital, to start The 
Tribune. Prom the outset his idea was to appeal to the intellect of the 
people, to make his paper the organ of thought, of principle, of literature, 
science, and invention. He would not neglect the news, but he would devote 
most attention to editorial comment and discussion. While Bennett sought to 
record history in The Herald. Greeley strove to make history in The Tribune. 
While as a news-gatherer, business man, and managing editor, Greeley was far 
inferior not only to the colossal genius of Bennett, but to the majority of his 
contemporaries, as an editorial writer and political controversialist he was abso- 
lutely and incomparably supreme. By the sole virtue of its editorial columns 
he made The Tribune the greatest journalistic force of the times. 

In the early years of these great papers, when steamboats and railroads 
were new and few, the telegraph in embryo, and the submarine cable scarcely 
dreamed of, news-gathering was far different from what it is to-day. Perhaps 
the competition between rival papers was even keener than now. Certainly it 
was more picturesque. Special swift-sailing boats were chartered, pony 
expresses and mounted couriers, carrier-pigeons, signal flags, and beacon 
fires — all were impressed into the service. One of many classic incidents may 
be cited. Two rival correspondents went to a town far distant from the railroad 
to report some momentous occurrence. Their work done, they hired a man to 
convey them back to the railroad with his horse and wagon, just in time to 
catch the last train to the city. On the way, in a spot remote from any house, 
one slyly bargained with the driver for the purchase of the horse, closed the 
bargain on the spot, unhitched, mounted and galloped off to the railroad, leav- 
ing his discomfited rival hopelessly stranded ! All European news came by 
steamer, of course, and " Four Days Later from Europe" was a familiar caption 
over a column or two of gleanings from English papers just received. After a 
time the principal New York papers agreed to unite in the general work of 
news-gathering, dividing among themselves the cost of telegraph tolls, and cable 
tolls when the Atlantic cable was laid, and using the news received in common. 
Thus the Associated Press was formed, a combination of The Courier and 
Enquire)-. 'The Herald, The Sun. 'The 'Tribune, The 'Times. 'The Express, and The 
'Journal of Commerce. The first named was afterward succeeded by The 
World, ami The Express by The Mail and Express. And thus was formed 
the greatest news-gathering corporation in the world. 

The papers still, of course, employed many special correspondents, and 
these became more numerous as, year by year, the cost of telegraphing became 
less. Volumes of authentic stories of the enterprise and adventure of these 
correspondents, in peace and war, might be told, surpassing in thrilling or 
amusing interest most tales of fiction. The competition between them has been 
most keen. A very important event, for example, was to be reported at a dis- 



PRIMITIVE PRINTING PRESSES. 



607 



tant country town where there was only one telegraph operator, and he a slow 
one, who would only be able, during the whole evening, to send the "copy" of 
one of the half-dozen correspondents. So the one who first got him at work 
on his manuscript and kept him busy would "have a beat" on all the others. 
And one of them did so. Hours before the event occurred and the news could 
be written, he gave the operator a Bible and told him to telegraph it to his 
paper. The operator obeyed, and sent chapter after chapter of Genesis over 
the wires until the shrewd correspondent could get his manuscript ready and 
substitute it for the sacred volume. When the Atlantic cable came into use 
the cost of telegraphing was so great that the papers employed it very 
sparingly. But during the Franco-German war of 1870-71, The Tribune (New 
York) startled the world and opened a new era in journalism by receiving by 
cable from its correspondents column after column of news, at a cost of thou- 
sands of dollars. 

Fully commensurate with the growth of the newspaper press in numbers 
and influence has been the 
progress made in the me- 
chanical equipment ot the 
offices. The superiority of 
the telegraph over the mail 
coach as a news carrier is 
no more marked than that of 
the composing and press 
rooms of to-day over those 
of Franklin's time. The 
first paper mill in America 
was established at Philadel- 
phia more than a century 

ago, and soon after printing ink was made and type was cast equal to any 
in the world. The primitive hand-press was, however, still in use. That on 
which Franklin first worked is yet preserved in Boston. It was brought from 
England, and was like those used by the Braclfords, Keimer, and others in 
those days. It consisted of a horizontal table, on which the "form" of type 
was placed. Ink was spread on the type with a cabbage-shaped " ball," 
the sheet of paper was laid on, a blanket placed over it, and then, by 
means of a lever, a heavy iron plate was brought down upon it, pressing 
the paper evenly upon the inked type and printing one side of the sheet. 
The paper was then taken off, and another sheet used in the same way, 
and so on. By this tedious and laborious method only a few hundred impres- 
sions, at best, could be made in an hour. Ramage, a Philadelphia press-maker, 
and Clymer, his business rival, designed new presses at the beginning of the 




PATENT SINGLE SMALL CYLINDER PRESS. 



60S THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

present century, which differed from the former only in having a sliding bed for 
the type to rest on, so that it could be brought out from under the platen for 
inking and laying on the paper. But steam-power soon came into use, and 
inventors began to meditate its application to the printing of newspapers. The 
first power-press in America was made by Daniel Treadwell, of Boston, in 1822. 
Like the old hand-presses, it had a flat type bed and a flat platen coming down 
upon it. But a new principle, that of the cylinder press, had been conceived 
by English machinists, and it soon found its way hither. Richard M. Hoe, in 
1828, first put into operation in America a successful cylinder press. In it the 
type lay on a flat sliding bed, while the paper was pressed upon it by a large 
cylinder revolving above the type, the ink being put upon the type by rollers. 
This single cylinder press would turn off a thousand impressions an hour. In 
improved form it is at the present day one of the most widely used of presses 
for book and job work and small newspaper offices. Two years later Mr. Hoe 
brought out a double cylinder press, working on the same general principle, 
but with two small cylinders instead of one large one, and capable of doing 
twice as much work. Another still more striking innovation appeared in 1846 — 
the most important improvement that had yet been made in presses. Mr. Hoe 
brought out a " four cylinder type-revolving" printing machine. In it the forms 
of type, instead of lying on a flat bed, were fastened on the outside of a huge 
revolving cylinder, while four small cylinders pressed the sheets of paper 
against it. Thus four sheets were running through the press at once. Its 
capacity was 8000 sheets, printed on one side, an hour. The Philadelphia 
Ledger bought and used the first one, and soon other great papers in America 
and Europe adopted this press. But with that Mr. Hoe was not content. He 
developed the same principle, adding more feed rollers, till at last he 
constructed a mammoth ten-cylinder press. This was operated by eleven men, 
and printed 20,000 sheets an hour, on one side. The New York Tribune bought 
the first one, in 1855, and The Loudon Times sent to America for two more in 
[857. It was supposed that this marvelous engine represented the highest 
possible achievement of inventive skill in that direction. And then, when 
machines for folding the printed sheets were also invented, men thought the 
perfection of newspaper making had been attained. 

Not all men thought so, however. William A. Bullock, of Philadelphia, 
ditl not. Already stereotype plates were used on the great cylinders instead 
of the forms of type. Mr. Bullock determined to do away with the feeders, 
also. He put the stereotype plates on the surfaces of small cylinders, made 
his paper in a continuous strip a mile or so long, and passed it continuously over 
the inked plates ; and thus the web-perfecting press of to-day came into being. 
In this ingenious machine, as now used, there are two cylinders covered with 
stereotype plates, one for each side of the sheet. The huge roll of paper, 



THE ACME OF PRINTING MACHINES. 



609 



moistened with water beforehand while being unwound from one spindle and 
wound upon another, is put in place at one end of the press. The machinery 
is started. The paper unwinds and enters the press. Sheet by sheet is cut off 
with mathematical accuracy by a knife worked by the press. The sheet passes 
over one cylinder anil is printed on one side, then under the other and is printed 
on the other side. Then it is cut into two, the two halves pasted together at 
the centre, folded into convenient form, and delivered at the other end of the 
press ready for the newsboy ! The machine does all this automatically, at the 
rate of from fifteen to twenty thousand copies an hour, the pressman having 




1HK HULI.01 KiluK I'l-.KH-J UNO I'KLSS. 



nothing to do after starting the press, but to sit in his easy chair and watch it 
work, and to put in a new roll of paper when the first three-mile roll is 
exhausted. The patents on this press were purchased by Mr. Hoe, and he 
became perhaps the best known maker of it. There are various other modifi- 
cations of the same ingenious principle, in the Walter, "Victory," Campbell, 
Scott, Marinoni, Derriery, and other web-perfecting presses. In the latest Hoe 
presses rolls of paper five miles long are used, the sheets are printed on both 
sides before they are cut off, four duplicate sets of stereotype plates are used, 
and fifty thousand papers an hour have been turned out. 

For many years the composing-room lagged far behind the press-room. 
39 



610 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Many attempts were made to set type by machinery, but without great success, 
and down to a dozen years ago the old system generally prevailed. A separ- 
ate metal type was used for each character, and these types were picked by 
hand, one by one, from compartments in a tray, and placed in a composing-stick, 
thence to be transferred to the galley and the form. But about 1880 a Mr. 
Mergenthaler, of Baltimore, brought into practical working an entirely new 
device, which did away with ordinary types altogether. The operator of this 
machine sits at and works upon a key-board, which has one key for each char- 
acter used. When a key is touched there drops from a tube a brass plate 
with the character engraved on one of its edges. These plates fall side by side 
in a trough, with spacings between the words. When enough are in place to 
fill a line they are passed by the, machine underneath a tank of melted metal 
and a thin bar cast, with the impression from the brass matrices in raised letters 
upon one edge of it. It is, in fact, a line of type cast in one solid piece, and it 
takes its place in the galley and in the form, and from a page-form, thus made up, 
a stereotype plate is made. These machines, and others of similar construction, 
are rapidly coming into general use. Their saving in labor, time, and expense 
over the old system of hand type-setting is enormous. The cost of type-found- 
ing is dispensed with ; so is the labor of redistribution of type, for the machine 
automatically returns the brass matrices to their proper receptacles as soon as 
the casting of the line is completed ; the metal is remelted and used over and 
over again, the type-bars being always new and clean ; and in making up the 
fi Tins the bars are much easier to handle than separate types, and there is prac- 
tically no danger of " pi." 

The operations of the stereotyping-room are so simple as scarcely to need 
mention here. The form, or page, of type is placed on an iron table ; sheets 
of damp paper are spread upon it and thoroughly beaten down upon it with 
huge brushes, so as to take an exact impression of the face of the type ; then 
the form, with the paper lying on it, is placed in a drying machine ; when dry, 
the paper is taken from the type and is found to have become a single heavy 
sheet of card-board, with a deep, sharp impression of the type on one side ; it 
is put into a mould, curved to fit the press cylinders, and melted type-metal 
poured in ; this makes the plate, and when cool it is taken out, trimmed, and 
sent to the press-room. The entire operation takes only four or five minutes. 

In the morning the reporters and correspondents begin the work of observing 
events and collecting news. All day long they are busy ; and the editorial 
writers also are busy, writing their articles. During the evening the news pours 
in, reporters come into the office to write their "stories," and other matter 
comes by mail, by messenger, by telegraph, by telephone. The news editors 
receive it, correct it, cut it down according to the exigencies of space, and send it to 
the composing-room. There it is put in type, and the forms are one by one made 



SUNDAY AND WEEKLY ISSUES. 611 

up and sent to the stereotyping-room. The plates are cast and sent down to 
the press-room, where they are put on the cylinders, and the vast rolls of paper 
are moistened ready for printing. An hour or so after midnight the last dispatch 
is put in type, the last form made up, the plate cast, sent down, and put on the 
press. The pressman pulls a lever, the cylinders revolve, and the printed 
record of the world's latest day, compiled by a hundred historians, is reeled off 
at the rate of tens of thousands of copies an hour. 

Printing has been called the art preservative of arts. It is also the art to 
which all others are tributary. Steam and electricity have been brought to the 
service of the newspaper. So, too, has photography, of late years, in a wonder- 
ful manner. Formerly, illustrations were used in books and magazines, engraved 
by slow and costly processes. A few weekly papers used them, but daily 
papers almost never. The first attempts at illustrations in the daily press were 
rude and uncouth in the extreme. Some efforts were made to publish distinct- 
ively illustrated daily papers, but their success was not great. If the pictures 
were cheaply made, they were unattractive ; if they were well made, they were 
too costly. But with the development of photography, new, cheap, and admirable 
processes of engraving came forward. Instead of laboriously sketching a scene 
with pencil and paper, the artist now secures it in an instant with his camera ; 
the plate is developed in a few minutes, printed, and engraved. And thus the 
event of one day is photographed, engraved, and the picture printed in the next 
morning's daily paper in much better style than many book illustrations could 
boast a generation ago. 

The Sunday newspaper is another "modern improvement." It became a 
popular institution during the War of the Rebellion, when the public insisted 
on having a newspaper every day of the week. Year by year since then it 
has been elaborated and improved, until now it is one of the literary wonders 
of the world. It is much larger than the daily issue, consisting of from sixteen 
to thirty-six or forty pages. Besides the news of the day, it contains special 
correspondence, criticisms, reviews, sketches, biographies, fiction, departments 
of science and art, and, indeed, a whole magazine of varied literature. There 
are, probably, special contributions from half a dozen of the most eminent 
writers in the world ; all sold for five cents ! 

These sheets, however, with their hundreds of thousands of circulation, 
have by no means driven the magazines and weekly papers from the field. On 
the contrary, these latter enjoy a constantly increasing prosperity. The great 
illustrated weeklies enjoy vast patronage, and merit it by producing pages that, 
in respect of matter and mechanical execution, rival the best book-work. The 
world has seen no finer specimens of illustrated weekly journalism than such 
periodicals as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie 's, and The Illustrated American. 
The non-illustrated periodicals, too, have attained an enviable rank. Many 



6i2 THE STORY OF- AMERICA. 

members of the religious and semi-religious press, such as The Independent, 
The Christian Union, The Congregationalist, The Interior, The Christian at 
Work, The Examiner, TJic Evangelist, The Churchman, etc., present each week 
not merely ephemeral notes and comments, but a great mass of permanent, 
original literature, of the highest class, from the best minds of the age. Every 
religious sect now has its organ ; most of them several. Every trade and 
business calling, every profession, every department of human activity and 
interest, has its periodical. The result is such a minute and detailed preserva- 
tion, in paper and type, of the records of the world, and such an interchange of 
thought and diffusion of information, as without the press never could have 
been approximated to and never would have been dreamed of. 

How great a part all this has played and is playing in the colossal drama 
of human progress is scarcely to be estimated. No estimate can seem extrava- 
gant, not even that of Wendell Phillips when he said : " The newspaper is 
parent, school, college, pulpit, theatre, example, counselor, all in one. Every 
drop of our blood is colored by it. Let me make the newspapers, and I care 
1 not who makes the religion or the laws." The magnitude of this institution is 
now almost beyond appreciation. In iS 14 the whole United States contained 
only 280 weekly, thirty semi-weekly, eighteen tri-weekly, and twenty-eight daily 
papers, with an aggregate yearly issue of 23,000,000 copies. To-day New York 
alone far surpasses those figures, and any single one of a number of daily papers 
tar exceeds in aggregate yearly issue the whole list of those named above. Our 
paper mills produce a quarter of a million tons of stock each year. A single 
newspaper in New York City uses every week a strip of paper five feet three 
inches wide and more than a thousand miles long. More than a thousand daily 
papers are printed in the United States, with a gross circulation of four million 
copies a day, and the people pay for them, in cents to newsboys, and in larger 
sums for monthly or yearly subscriptions, more than $30,000,000 a year. New 
York still leads the country in the number and importance of its periodicals, but 
a dozen other cities have great dailies rivaling in size and ability those of the 
metropolis ; while every city and large town has at least one daily, and almost 
every village and hamlet its weekly paper. Whatever work is to be done, 
whatever reform wrought, be it the exploration of an unknown land, the 
reorganization of the country's fiscal system or the righting of great social 
wrongs, the building of a new political party or the crushing of a corrupt 
political ring — it is the press that takes the initiative, it is through the press that 
the task is accomplished. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

HOW WE GOVERN OURSELVES. 



BY MISS ANNA L. DAWES, 
Autlior of Life of Sumnei . , : 




ft*V —v HE Government of the United States is unique in three respects : 
' »k It is the largest and most successful democracy that has ever 

&Q, \ "?*-■> existed, it is a federal system, and it has a written Constitu- 
tion. Perhaps it may be called unique in its methods also, for 
no other government is made up of three separate and yet equal 
branches, each in some sense the Government, but all neces- 
sary to any complete action of the nation ; and still again those 
departments, the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judiciary, have each their 
own peculiar and distinctive features. Legislation is representative and not 
democratic. The Executive has not only the duty of executing the laws, 
but a power of veto over them, and the Supreme Court stands alone in all the 
world in its place and importance. 

The Government of the United States, in the expressive phrase of Abraham 
Lincoln, is "A government by the people, of the people, and for the people." 
It is this which is the great glory of our nation, and it must not be forgotten in 
comparing it with others. It is often claimed that England is more democratic 
in fact, Germany more attentive to the needs of the people ; but these advan- 
tages ignore the great fundamental distinction of this republic, the fact that all 
power is derived from the people. Briton and Germany alike hold that power 
comes from the throne and its reserved rights remain with the throne. But 
every American believes that power comes from the people, the Executive is 
in some sense an agent, and the reserved rights remain with the people. The 
difference is not only fundamental, but there result from it doctrines and relations 
which run through all our system and our methods as well. No amount of super- 
ficial flexibility, as in England, or of temporary advantage, as in Germany, can at 
all compensate for this great and far-reaching distinction, this confidence in and 
dependence upon the people. Again, we have two kinds of law — that made by 
Congress as the needs of the time require, law which may be altered according to 

6u 



6 H THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

occasion, and the great permanent Constitution, which only the people and the 
States acting together can alter, and that after long and careful process, and to 
which all other law must conform. This Constitution is truly enough the 
bulwark of our liberties ; no sudden whims or changing passions can deprive us 
of the fundamental rights guaranteed by it ; the storm of battle has proved it 
strong enough to stand against all assaults, and the stress of unequaled growth 
has shown it broad enough for all demands. It seems, indeed, as if a superhuman 
wisdom was given to the forefathers. Molded by Hamilton, and Franklin, and 
the Adamses, and Madison, and Ellsworth, and many another great man, it 
drew its inspiration from French philosophers and Dutch methods, and the 
mingled love and hate for English practice. The government of a little Baptist 
church in Pennsylvania, and the Connecticut town-meeting, and the conflicting 
interests of different sections, and many other elements entered in to make 
this great instrument what it is. Under it we have lived for one hundred years, 
and have stretched our boundaries from one ocean to the other, from the 
frozen seas of the Arctic Circle to the tropical waters of the Gulf. We have 
endured three wars, and are grown so strong that the great governments of 
Europe hesitate to encounter us, and sit by our side in equal honor ; we have be- 
come sixty million people, and our riches are matched with imperial treasuries, but 
our doors are ever open to the laborer and we give him all opportunity, until 
he shall stand at the top if it pleases him. Side by side the rich and the poor, 
the learned and the unlearned, the chief among us and the least of all, hold the 
great gift of governing, and we count them each a man ; and the whole great 
and glorious structure rests on the firm and enduring rock of the Constitution. 

The Government is carried on, according to the terms of this Constitution 
and under its provisions, by three great branches : Congress, which makes the 
laws ; the judiciary, which interprets these laws and decides whether they agree 
with the Constitution ; and the Executive, which carries them out. And since 
this is a government of the people, Congress, which represents the people and 
expresses their will, is the centre around which the whole government turns. 

Congress is composed of two houses, the House of Representatives and 
the Senate. The House of Representatives is elected every two years, and 
each member of it represents somewhat more than 150,000 people. Each 
State sends as many Congressmen as are necessary to represent its whole 
population, being divided into districts containing each a population of 150,000, 
from among which the members of Congress are chosen. The requirement 
that the representative shall live within the State is an important distinction 
between our system and that of England. An English district or borough may 
elect a member of Parliament from any part of the nation, and thus it is believed 
the House of Commons will be composed of the best men in the country ; but 
it is our purpose to have every part of the country represented, and, therefore, 



HOW CONGRESS IS COMPOSED. 



615 



by an unwritten law, never disregarded, we require that each Congressman shall 
reside in the district which chooses him. Thus, so far as possible, every man in 
the country is represented. It must always be remembered, however, that the 
government of the United States is not a pure democracy, but a republic. It 
is first and foremost a representative government. In every possible way 
endeavor is made that each man shall be represented, but he must act through 
a representative. The short term of service insures that these representatives 
shall reflect the changing will of the people, and furnishes a remedy for all 
unjust or foolish action. He shows an entire ignorance of our system who 
complains of the tyranny of government in the United States. The House 
of Representatives is its chief governing power, and, remade as it is by the 
people themselves once in two years, it is constantly controlled by the will of 
the people. 

This very fact, the fact that the House of 
Representatives can be altered so readily, and 
always will reflect every passing change of 
public sentiment, made it necessary and highly 
desirable to add some more permanent element 
to Congress. For this, among other reasons, 
a Senate was created. Senators are elected 
once in six years, and represent the people of 
a whole State. Thus, because he is more 
permanent, and because he is chosen by a 
larger constituency, a senator represents the 
more stable elements of political thought, not 
so much the passing feeling of the moment, 
but the deep underlying opinions and wishes 

of a large number of people. Moreover, as the Senate is so arranged that 
only one senator from a State is elected at a time, and only one-third of 
the senators go out of office on any given year, it becomes in some sense a 
stable body, and acts as a check upon the excitements and lack of wisdom 
natural to such a body as the House. 

Still another reason, and that of great importance, marks the value of the 
Senate to the people. It is, in fact, more necessary to the preservation of our 
system than the House itself. The senators represent the States directly, 
and each State has two senators, no more and no less. This places each State 
on an equal footing with every other, a result obviously an important element 
in our political system, and of the greatest practical importance to our liberties. 
By reason of this provision in our Constitution, Delaware or Rhode Island are 
of equal power in the Senate with Texas or New York, furnishing a check 
upon the unregulated control of any one section. If the Senate, like the House, 




EX-SECRETARY OF 



616 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

represented the population and not the States, shortly enough Congress would 
be controlled by the great cities, or, perhaps, by the great States. The tyranny 
of New York or Chicago would be replaced by the tyranny of California or 
Texas. The immense mass of their people would always control the country, 
and we should be at the mercy of a practical monarchy. The equal power of 
the small States in the Senate goes far to prevent this result and to preserve 
the rule of the whole people, an actual as well as a nominal democracy. The 
Senate is altogether necessary to the country, and he is a false friend who 
would persuade the country to undermine it or destroy its relations to the 
States by making it a popular body. So thoroughly was this understood by 
the men who made the Constitution that a unique provision was inserted forbid- 
ding any amendment which should deprive the States of their equal representa- 
tion in the Senate without their own consent, practically a prohibition of such 
an amendment. 

Congress has power to raise funds for our necessities by taxes, to borrow 
money, if necessary, to establish postal facilities, to coin or print our money, 
to regulate our foreign affairs, to make war, to control many other matters, and 
to make all the laws relative to these concerns. 

It requires both houses of Congress to pass the laws that govern us. A 
bill originates .in the House or the Senate, according to its nature, is debated 
and passed by that body, sent to the other, debated and passed by that, and 
then sent to the President, who signs it, and thereby it becomes a law. If any 
of these conditions fail it falls to the ground. Either branch can refuse to pass 
a measure, and the President may refuse to sign, or veto it. But in this latter 
case, since the will of the people is the supreme power, the vetoed bill may be 
passed again, over the head of the President, as the phrase goes, if two-thirds of 
each house of Congress can be thereafter induced to vote for it. All bills for fur- 
nishing money must originate in the House of Representatives, that the people, by 
controlling the purse strings, may still more thoroughly control the Government. 
The Senate, on the other hand, has the power to consider and pass upon our 
treaties, and has also the duty of confirming or refusing all appointments of any 
importance. 

The officers of the House of Representatives are a Speaker, elected from 
among its members, who presides over its deliberations, a Clerk, a Sergeant-at- 
Arms, a Doorkeeper, and several smaller officers necessary to carry on its 
business. The Senate is presided over by the Vice-President of the United 
States, and in his absence by one of the senators, chosen by themselves for 
that duty, and known as the President pro tempore. This body has also a Clerk 
and Sergeant-at Arms and minor officials. The business of Congress is largely 
done by its committees, which consider all important subjects before they are 
brought to the attention of either house. These committees are appointed by 



DUTIES OF THE CONGRESS. 



61; 



the Speaker in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate are selected by 
a committee of the senators. Each Congress lasts for two years, although not 
in session all of the time. Congress meets in the Capitol at Washington on the 
first Monday in December of every year. The first year the session lasts until 
both houses can agree to adjourn, thus giving time for free and ample discus- 
sion of every subject. These "long sessions" usually continue until July or 
August, and sometimes until October. On the alternate years Congress is 
directed by the Constitution to adjourn on the fourth day of March, thus pre- 




SENATE CHAMBER. 



venting the attempt to make any one Congress permanent. All Congressmen 
are paid a salary, in order that poor men may have an equal chance with the 
rich. This salary is $5000 for both senators and representatives, except in the 
case of the Speaker and President of the Senate, who each of them receive 
$8000. No religious tests are allowed, and any man may belong to either house 
who is a citizen of the United States, who resides in the State which elects him, 
and who is of suitable age, twenty-five years in the House and thirty years 
in the Senate. 

When the laws are made they must be carried out; and this is the busi- 



6i8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



ness of the Executive department of the Government, a co-equal branch with 
the Legislative department. The President is the chief executive officer of the 
nation, and as such is properly the chief personage and principal officer in the 
land. It is no mistake to style him the " chief ruler" of the United States, for, 
although the people are our only rulers, they do this ruling through and by 
means of the President and Congress, and thus depute him to rule over them 
for the time being. The President is only in a limited sense the agent of the 
people, but he is their chosen, although temporary, ruler, who is to carry out 
their laws. 

The President and Vice-President are chosen once in four years and elected 




HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 



by the people, who vote by States and not directly as a nation. The citizens of 
each State vote for a body of men called electors, equal in number to their 
Congressmen, who in turn choose the President a few weeks later. As a matter 
of fact, their choice is always known beforehand, as they are elected on the dis- 
tinct understanding of their preference. Although the method is somewhat 
clumsy, the principle is most necessary. In all our affairs, so far as possible, we 
must continue to act by States. It is only thus that our federal system can be 
preserved, and in that lies our safety and success. 

The qualifications for President are that he shall be a native-born Ameri- 
can, who has resided in the country for fourteen years, and who is thirty-five 



DUTIES OF THE EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT. 



619 



years old. He is inaugurated with much pomp and ceremony on the fourth of 
March, every four years, and resides at the Executive Mansion, or \\ nite 
House, in Washington, during his term of office. He is paid a salary of 
$50,000, that he may keep up a suitable state and dignity as our chief ruler. 
If he is guilty of treason, or other "high crimes and misdemeanors," of such 
importance that his continuance in office is dangerous to our liberties, he may 
be impeached by the House of Representatives, tried by the Senate, and, if 
found guilty, deposed, in which case his office would fall to the Vice-President. 
An effort was made to impeach President Johnson in 1866, but there being no 
adequate ground for such action, he was acquitted. 




THE WHITE HOUSE -MAIN ENTRANCE. 



The duties of the Executive department are mostly connected with the 
administration of the laws. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Army 
and Navy, and he also represents the nation in matters connected with foreign 
governments. To that end he sends out foreign ministers to other govern- 
ments, and consuls, to conduct our business affairs in foreign ports. A large 
body of foreign ministers sent from other countries for a similar purpose reside 
at Washington, and throughout our cities are scattered foreign consuls for the 
transaction of commercial business. 

The President is assisted in his duties by a body of advisers, known as the 



620 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Cabinet. This consists of eight officers of great importance, of his own selec- 
tion and appointment, each of whom has control of affairs of the Government 
in his particular department. The Secretary of State conducts our foreign rela- 
tions ; the Secretary of the Treasury our financial affairs; the Secretary of War 
is over our armies ; the Attorney General is the law officer of the Government ; 
the Postmaster General superintends the postal service ; the Secretary of the 
Navy commands our navy ; the Secretary of the Interior is concerned with 
patents, the Indians, the public lands, and many other important matters ; and 
the Secretary of Agriculture promotes the farming interests of the country. 
Each of these Secretaries has his office in Washington, where he attends to the 
enormous business of his department. Under him are an immense number of 
officers and clerks, all appointed either by the President or the head of the 
department, to carry on the business of Government. Each department is 
divided into bureaus, and much of the work is of the highest value and 
importance. 

In case of the death or inability of the President, the duties of his office 
devolve upon the Vice-President, and after him would fall to the Cabinet succes- 
sively, in the order already named. But should any member of the Cabinet be 
obliged to take this office, he would fill it only until a new election could be held. 

We have had a long and remarkable list of Presidents, beginning with 
George Washington himself. There have been in all twenty-three different Presi- 
dents, by a curious coincidence covering twenty-four terms, and distributed 
among various political parties. Many of them were men of extraordinary 
ability. They have been strangely representative, some, like Washington and the 
Adamses being men of the aristocratic class, while others, like Jackson, and Lin- 
coln, and Garfield, were proud of their origin from among the poorest of the 
people. Twice the descendant of a President has filled that high place — John 
Quincy Adams being the son of John Adams, and Benjamin Harrison the grand- 
son of Wm. Henry Harrison. Two Presidents have brought beautiful and charm- 
ing brides to the White House during their term of office — President Tyler, who 
married Miss Julia Gardner, and President Cleveland, who married Miss Frances 
Folsom. Many times the people have delighted to honor the heroes of our 
wars. As one epoch after another passed in our history the laurels of war were 
placed upon the heads of Washington, of Andrew Jackson, of Wm. Henry 
Harrison, of Taylor, of Grant, and Hayes, and Garfield, and the second Harrison. 
Many different States have claimed the honor of the Presidency, but we have 
never yet had an Executive from the great Western States. Several Presidents 
have been re-elected, but by an unwritten law no man ever serves but two 
terms. Four have died in office, two of them, Lincoln and Garfield, having been 
assassinated. There have been many great men and many wise men in this 
office, but among them all there are three who stand out bevond their fellows, 



POWERS OF THE SUPREME COURT. 



621 



creators of history — George Washington, who founded the Republic ; Abraham 
Lincoln, the greatest of all our great men in any time, and Ulysses S. Grant, 
the chief among our generals. 

An elaborate system of courts make up our national judiciary, and secure 
to the citizens protection and justice. In some respects the most extraordinary 
feature of our Government is the Supreme Court, which is unique in its power 
and importance. It is the business of this tribunal to construe the laws, to 
decide whether they agree with the Constitution, to settle any question as to 




SMI i H^i INIAN INSTITUTE. 



whether the Constitution has been violated in deed, to decide upon suits 
between the States and the nation, and to determine legal questions between 
this and other countries. It is co-ordinate with Congress and the Executive, 
and yet the highest power in the land, for both bow to its decisions. Law and 
justice are preserved in its keeping, lest either of the other two great branches 
of the Government usurp the power, or transcend the Constitution. Any law 
the constitutionality of which is questioned, may be brought before this court, 
and its decision is final, confirming it against all opposition, or making it null 



622 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and void, and thus of no effect whatever. This court consists of nine judges, or 
justices as they are called, appointed for life or good behavior, by the President, 
and confirmed by the Senate. They are paid $10,000 a year, with a pension 
after they become too old for longer service. The head of the court, or the 
Chief Justice, administers the oath to the President on his inauguration, and 
many times stands next him in rank and position. Certainly no nobler illus- 
tration of the might and majesty of law can be given than this court, adjusting 
the affairs of the nation itself, to which President and people alike bow, in 
token that righteousness and justice are greater than power. 

No account of our Government would be in any sense complete, nor 
indeed would it be intelligible, that did not take into account our Federal system. 
The whole country is divided into States, and each State is a separate and' dis- 
tinct government, having control of its local affairs, and responsible to its own 
people. In all those larger affairs which concern the whole country, it joins 
with its fellows in the general Government, but the power of this general 
Government comes from the States. The States are not given more or less 
power by the United States, but the States give more or less power to the 
United States and reserve the other rights to themselves. The United States, 
however, has supreme control over all matters relating to the nation, and will 
not allow any State to infringe upon the rights or jeopardize the safety of any 
other. For that reason it will not permit any State or States to secede, because 
the cooperation of them all is necessary to the safety of the Union. We are 
States united into a nation, but we are a nation, one and indissoluble. 

The history of the country makes plain these relations. Thirteen colonies, 
settled by different peoples of different origins and for widely different reasons, 
joined each other for the sake of common safety and national prosperity. 
Practical necessity and political wisdom alike dictated that local affairs should 
continue under the control of each colony or State, while matters of general 
interest were decided by the whole acting together. To this end each colony 
gave up to the nation its general rights but reserved the power over its internal 
affairs. It is this federal system which makes it possible for a democratic 
government to rule such an immense country, and it is only this. Therefore, 
while we are careful to retain the supreme control to the general Government, 
we must more and more relegate sectional concerns, however large and import- 
ant, to the States ; and we must guard against the centralizing of our affairs in 
the hands of the national Government, however much to our temporary advan- 
tage it may be. In the nature of the case we cannot govern territory of such 
enormous extent, with so various a population and such varying interest, by 
democratic methods unless we keep strictly to the federal idea. It is our only 
safety. 

Each State has a Governor, Legislature, and Supreme Court of its own ; 



RELATION OF STATES TO THE NATION. 623 

the Governor, Legislature, and, in some States, the Supreme Court, being 
elected by its own people. Different States require different qualifications in 
their voters ; in some a man must be able to read and write ; in some be pos- 
sessed of certain property ; in one there is no distinction between men and 
women ; and various other requirements are found in the different States. 
Whatever makes a man a voter in his own State allows him to vote in that State 
in national elections also. 

The term of office of State officers varies greatly, some States holding their 
Legislatures annually, and some biennially ; some Governors being elected for 
one year and some for longer terms. In all these, its own affairs, the Stat' 1 is 
supreme. Each has its own courts, under its Supreme Court, for the further- 
ance of justice. Local affairs also are very variously administered, by townships, 
counties, parishes, and other subdivisions, many of them very ancient, and in 
like manner cities are governed in different ways. All this diversity in unity 
serves to make one homogeneous nation of this heterogeneous multitude of sixty 
million people. 

The original thirteen States, little as they dreamed of the great territory over 
which the flag of the United States floats so proudly to-day, had no narrow idea 
of a nation, and provided for its expansion even better than they knew. The 
common land belonging to the nation, and as yet largely unsettled, is held by 
the common Government, in Territories. These are governed by officers 
appointed by the President, and are subject to United States laws only. Their 
own Legislatures arrange their local affairs, and each sends a delegate to Con- 
gress to look after its interests, but the law does not allow him to vote. As 
soon as any Territory contains a population large enough, Congress admits it 
to the Union as a State, with all the rights and privileges of its older sisters. 
the President proclaims that fact to the world, and a new commonwealth is 
added to the sisterhood, marked by the new star in the flag we honor. Thus 
one after another we have already seen thirty-one new States added to that 
little band of thirteen, some of them great and rich realms many times as large 
as the whole nation at its beginning. 

The United States is indeed a land of the free, and its great written charter, 
the Constitution, itself protects the freedom of her citizens. The right to wor- 
ship God as he will, the right to assemble when and where he will, freedom of 
speech and press, and of petition, the right to keep and bear arms — all these 
great gifts the United States gives to every person in all her broad borders. Nor 
is this enough ; she preserves his house inviolate from search and seizure, and 
everywhere in all his relations throws the shield of the law over his person and 
possessions. If indeed he be accused of crime, she makes certain that he shall 
have justice, for by the right to a trial by jury and by many other careful provisions 
she protects both his person and property, and in the last and greatest articles 



62 4 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



of her great Magna Charta — articles for which she spent blood and treasure 
beyond the telling — she forbids all slavery within all her borders, and guarantees 
to every citizen his right to vote without regard to "race, color, or previous 
condition of servitude." For this is the duty which the United States asks of 
every man-child within her borders, to help her govern herself. This is his 
proud privilege — to choose her officers, to control her policy, to sustain her 
laws, and through his representatives to make them ; to develop the Nation, and 
eovern her. This is what it is to vote in the United States of America. 




BAILEY S DAM O.N THE RED RIVER. 



L 




CHAPTER XXXVI. 

OUR PRESIDENTS. 

HEN the office of President was to be filled for the first time, 
grave problems were to be solved. The hardship and 
■<9) suffering' of the struggle for independence were yet present 
in the minds of all men ; the weakness and failure of the 
Government instituted by the Articles of Confederation had 
compelled an attempt "to form a more perfect Union;" 
the eyes of the civilized world were upon the struggling 
people, and to men who had not an abiding faith in the prin- 
ciples for which the battles of the Revolution had been 
fought, it seemed that the experiment of popular Government was to end in 
early, complete, and appropriate catastrophe. 

In such circumstances it was well that the public needs were so great and 
so immediate as to make men willing to forget their differences and consider 
measures for the common good ; and particularly was it well for the future of 
our country, that there was one man upon whom all could agree as uniting the 
wisdom, the moderation, the experience, the dignity necessary to the first 
President of the United States. 

George Washington was the only man ever unanimously elected President. 
Of his personal history and of his character, enough has been said in another 
place. He undertook the duties of the Chief Magistracy with a deep sense of 
their importance, and their difficulty, but with the courage and devotion which 
characterized all his conduct. He selected for his Cabinet men of widely 
different political views, but men whose names were not new to Americans, men 
whose past services justified the belief that they would find means of leading 
the country out of its present difficulties, and of setting the affairs of the 
Government on a sure foundation. Jefferson, Hamilton, Knox and Randolph, 
might well be trusted to concert wise measures. 

Washington's second election was, like the first, without opposition, and for 

four years more he continued to guicfe the affairs of State. A national hank had 

been established early in his first term, and also the Philadelphia Mint, and the 

currency of the country was now on a fairly satisfactory basis ; a census had 

4° 625 




:E<JK<Jt WASHINGTON. 

1732-1799. 
Two Terms, 1789-1797. 



JOHN ADAMS. 627 

been taken in 1790 and showed that the country had already begun to grow in 
population, and the outlook was much more favorable than four years earlier. 

Upon the announcement of Washington's retirement, the two parties, 
which had been gradually developing an organization, prepared to contest the 
election of the second President. The Federalists, who advocated a strong 
central Government, favored John Adams, and the Republicans, who " claimed 
to be the friends of liberty and the rights of man, the advocates of economy, and 
of the rights of the States," desired the election of Thomas Jefferson. The 
Federalists were in a slight majority, and Mr. Adams was elected. He was a 
native of Massachusetts, and had borne a leading part in the struggle for 
independence and the development of the Government. He was one of the 
leaders in Massachusetts in resisting the oppressive measures which brought 
on the Revolution ; he seconded the resolution for the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, and assisted in framing that remarkable document ; with Franklin and 
Jay, he negotiated the treaty which established our independence ; he had 
represented his country as Minister to France, and to Holland, and was the 
first United States Minister to England; he had been Vice President during 
Washington's two administrations, and was now to assume office as the second 
President. 

His Presidency opened with every prospect of war with the French. That 
nation had taken offense because we preserved an attitude of neutrality in their 
contest with Great Britian. They actually began war by capturing our merchant 
ships, and the French Directory refused to receive the new United States 
Minister, while three commissioners, who were sent to make one more effort for 
peace, were insulted. Under the influence of the war spirit thus excited, the 
Federalists in Congress passed two acts, known as the Alien and Sedition Laws, 
which resulted in the downfall of their party. The former gave the President 
authority to order out of the country any alien whom he considered dangerous 
to its welfare, and the latter was intended to suppress conspiracies and malicious 
abuse of the government. They excited great opposition and were almost 
immediately repealed. The war had already been terminated on the accession 
of Napoleon Bonaparte to power in France. 

Mr. Adams failed of re-election, largely because of the division of sentiment 
in regard to the French war. His great patriotism, high moral courage, and his 
ability as a statesman, were somewhat marred by a strange lack of tact, and a 
stupendous vanity, which sometimes made him ridiculous, but his countrymen 
could well afford to forget such minor faults, and remember only his manifold 
services in their common cause. He was succeeded by a man no less great. 
Thomas Jefferson was the son of a Virginia planter, received his education at 
William and Mary College, studied law and engaged in its practice. He resolved, 
on entering public life, never to engage, while in public office, in any kind of 



6-8 



THE STOP.V OF AMERICA. 



enterprise for the improvement of his fortune, nor to wear any other character 
than that of a farmer. When he came to the Presidency his country already 
owed him much. As a member of the Continental Congress he wrote the draft 
of the Declaration of Independence ; returning to Virginia, he inaugurated a 
reformed system of laws in that State, and becoming its Governor rendered in- 
valuable aid to the armies during the closing years of the Revolution ; he shared 
with Gouverneur Morris the credit of devising our decimal system of money ; 
he succeeded Franklin as Minister to France, and on his return from that post, 
was informed that Washington had chosen him for the first Secretary of State. 

.He wished to decline further 
public service, but " It is not for 
an individual," said he to the 
President, "to choose his post; 
you are to marshal us as may be 
best for the public good." A 
difference of three electoral votes 
made Adams President and Jef- 
ferson Vice President, but in 
1800, a political revolution re- 
versed the majority and made him 
the third President. Although 
a leader of a party, he exerted 
himself to allay partisan rancor, 
and he resolutely refused to make 
official positions for his political 
friends, by removing from office 
men whose only offense was a 
difference of political opinion. 

Jefferson was re-elected by 
a largely increased majority. 
During his administration, the 
territory of Louisiana was pur- 
chased from France ; the famous expedition of Lewis and Clarke set out to 
explore this new domain ; the importation of slaves was forbidden ; the pirates 
of Tripoli and Algiers were suppressed ; the first steamboat began to navigate 
the Hudson, and the growing troubles with Great Britain and France caused 
the enactment of laws called the Embargo and Non-intercourse Acts, intended, 
by cutting off our commerce with those countries, to compel them to respect 
our neutrality. These two measures resulted in little but failure, as they 
caused great distress at home, and were repealed before they could have 
much effect abroad. 




JOHN ADAMS 

■735-'826. 

One Term, 1797-180 




THOM VS JEFFERSON. 



629 



6;o 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



,1 ■.,,,, |. ^ji; i ;/ -lipiMif,! li !. :IJ1|IIIII|III||I|||II»IPI 



When James Madison came to be the fourth President, he found the 
difficulties with England and France still unsettled. These countries being 
ancient enemies, and being almost continually at war, it was almost impossible 
to be on friendly terms with one without making an enemy of the other ; 
neither would respect our rights as a neutral nation ; each was in the habit 
of seizing and selling our ships and cargoes bound for the ports of the other, 
and England, in addition, assumed the right to search our vessels, examine 
their crews, and compel to enter her service any sailor who had been an 
English subject. These troubles were not new. Jay's treaty, in 1795, had 

vainly attempted to adjust a part 
of them, and as our country grew 
in strength it gradually became 
impossible for the people longer 
to submit. 

The War of 181 2, the "Sec- 
ond War for Independence," has 
been treated in another chapter. 
It occupied most of Madison's 
administration, and though not 
vigorously conducted, it demon- 
strated the military and naval 
resources of the country and 
caused the American flag to be 
respected all over the world ; 
and by cutting off the supply of 
foreign goods it compelled the 
starting of cotton and woollen 
mills in this country, and this 
resulted in the building up of 
home manufactures. 

The presidency of Mr. Madi- 
son is not the portion of his career 
upon which his fame rests ; his best services to his country were in his work as 
a constructive statesman. In the shaping of the Constitution and in securing 
its adoption he shared with Hamilton the chief honors. He was, doubtless, 
happy when, at the close of his second administration, he could retire to his 
Virginia estate and spend the remaining twenty years of his life in scholarly ease. 
Madison was succeeded by another Virginian, a gallant soldier of the Revo- 
lution, who had laid down his books at William and Mary College to complete 
his education in the Continental army. James Monroe was eighteen years old 
when he took part in the battle of Trenton, and his record justified the confi- 




JAMES MADISON. 
.751-1836. 

Two Terms, 1809-181 



JAMES MONROE. 



631 



dence with which his countrymen universally regarded him. In his inaugural 
address he took as a symbol of the enduring character of the Union, the 
foundation of the Capitol, near which he stood to deliver the address, 
and which had survived the ruins of the beautiful building recently burnt 
by the British. So popular was President Monroe, and so wisely did he 
administer the affairs of State that on his re-election there was no opposing 
candidate, and he lacked but one of a unanimous vote in the electoral 
college. This vote was cast for John Ouincy Adams, simply in order "that 
no later mortal should stand in Washington's shoes" in being unanimously 
elected. Monroe's two terms 
comprise an eventful period in 
our history ; the Government 
pensioned its Revolutionary sol- 
diers and their widows, spending 
in all sixty-five million dollars in 
this noble work ; Florida was 
purchased from Spain ; the Na- 
tional Road was begun at Cum- 
berland, Md., finally to extend 
as far as Illinois, and to be of 
inestimable service in the open- 
ing and development of the 
West ; but the subject which 
took the deepest hold upon the 
minds of the people was that of 
the extension of slavery. Follow- 
ing the " Era of Good Feeling" 
ushered in by Monroe's adminis- 
tration, came a serious division 
in public feeling as to whether 
slavery should be permitted in 
the northern part of the territory 

west of the Mississippi. The question arose so suddenly and was so fiercely 
debated that Jefferson declared that it terrified him, "like a fire-bell in the 
night," and he feared serious trouble between the States, the actual outbreak 
of which was postponed, by a series of compromises, for a period of forty 
years. Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise quieted the quarrel for some 
twenty-five years. 

President Monroe is perhaps most widely renowned as the author of the 
" Monroe Doctrine" — that no European nation has a right to interfere with the 
affairs of any American State — a doctrine to which our Government has steadily 




[AMES MONROE. 

1758-83!. 

Tiao Terms, 1817-1825. 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



adhered. It is interesting to note that the man who had served his country so 
well in the high position of its Chief Magistrate was willing, after the close of 
his second term, to accept so humble a post as that of Justice of the Peace, and 
so continue a public servant ; but it is sad to relate that Mr. Monroe's great 
generosity and public spirit left him, in his old age, embarrassed by debt, and 
necessitated the giving up of his residence at Oak Hill, in Virginia, to end his 
days in the home of a son-in-law, in New York. 

The "Era of Good Feeling" had left no organized national parties in 
politics, and there were four candidates voted for to succeed Monroe. This 

resulted in there being no ma-, 
jority in the electoral college, and 
the final choice was therefore 
made by the House of Repre- 
sentatives, John Ouincy Adams 
thus becoming the sixth Presi- 
dent. He was, perhaps, as well 
equipped for the position, at least 
in breadth of information, knowl- 
edge of state-craft, and experi- 
ence in political affairs, as any 
man who has ever filled it. At 
the age of fifteen he was secre- 
tary to the Minister to Russia ; 
after graduating at Harvard, and 
practicing law for a few years, he 
became United States Minister 
at the Hague, and afterwards at 
Berlin, St. Petersburg and Lon- 
don ; he had represented Massa- 
chusettes in the National Senate, 
and during the Presidency of Mr. 
Monroe he had been Secretary 
of State. His administration was not marked by any measure of national 
importance, but is notable as the era in which a number of projects for the 
promotion of commercial intercourse met with the success they deserved. 

We have already mentioned the National Road. It was no more impor- 
tant than the Erie Canal, "Clinton's Big Ditch," as it was derisively called, 
which was opened in 1825; and the experiments with "steam wagons" 
resulted, in 1S28, in the opening of a line of railroad which now forms part of 
the Baltimore & Ohio system. The first spadeful of earth was turned by the 
venerable Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, the only survivor of the signers of the 




JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 

1 767-1848. 

One Term, 1825-1829 



A NDREl V J A CKSON. 



633 



Declaration of Independence, who remarked in so doing, that he considered 
this among the most important acts of his life, "second only to that of signing 
the Declaration of Independence, if second to that." 

It is also to be noted that this era marks tin- beginning of that social move- 
ment, which in less than seventy years lias resulted in so marked a change in 
the views of Americans regarding the use ot intoxicants. 

Andrew Jackson, the seventh President, was the first who was not a citizen 
either of Massachusetts or Virginia. He was also the first who was not already 
known to his countrymen as a distinguished statesman. He was exceedingly 
poptdar, however, owing to his 
military services and to his ener- 
getic, honest and fearless, though 
headstrong, character. He had 
led a strange and eventful life. 
In his boyhood he had known all 
the hardships and privations ot 
absolute poverty ; at the age ot 
fourteen he was a prisoner of 
war, and nearly starved by his 
British captors. He studied law 
and emigrated from North Caro- 
lina to Tennessee. After that 
territory became a State he rep- 
resented it in Congress, and for 
a short time in the Senate. He 
was continually involved in quar- 
rels, fought several duels and 
made many bitter enemies as 
well as many warm friends. His 
success in leading the Tennessee 
militia against the Indians gained 
for him the reputation which 

caused his appointment to command in the Southwest near the close of the war 
of 1 81 2, and his brilliant defence of New Orleans gave "Old Hickory" a 
place in the hearts of his countrymen which resulted in their electing him to 
succeed John Ouincy Adams as President, and his ability and integrity were 
so manifest that he was re-elected in 1832 by the electoral votes ot all the 
States except seven. 

No period of our history is more interesting than the eight years of 
Jackson's administration. He was the first President to dismiss large numbers 
of officials in order to replace them by his own partisans. The anti-slavery 




ANDRl W JACKSON. 
1767-1845. 



6 34 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



movement took definite shape during- this time, and William Lloyd Garrison 
began the publication of the famous Liberator, and American literature had its 
beginnings. 

At this time came the first serious danger of a rupture between the States. It 
grew out of the tariff legislation, which South Carolina, under the lead of John 
C. Calhoun, undertook to nullify. The payment of the duties was refused, but 
the President sent General Scott to Charleston to enforce the law, and under 
the advice of Henry Clay a new and more satisfactory tariff was adopted. 
This difficulty and Jackson's determined opposition to the United States Bank, 

his fight against it, resulting in 
its destruction, are the events of 
this administration which pro- 
duced the most marked and last- 
ing effect upon our national his- 
tory. After the close of his 
second term he lived in retire- 
ment at his home, the famous 
" Hermitage," near Nashville, 
until his death, eight years later. 
Martin Van Buren had 
hardly entered upon the duties 
of the presidency when the great 
panic of 1837 occurred. It re- 
sulted from a variety of causes, 
among which may be mentioned 
the great number of worthless 
banks which sprang up after the 
discontinuance of the United 
States Bank ; the prevalence of 
wild speculation, particularly in 
o„c Term, 1837-1841. land, and the action of the 

Government in demanding that 
the banks should repay its deposits in coin. One good effect of this great 
public calamity was the establishment of a Treasury of the United States, 
independent of any bank or system of banks. 

It was during this administration that the Mormons formed their settlement 
in Nauvoo, Illinois, and in 1840 a regular line of steamships was established 
between Liverpool and Boston. 

Mr. Van Buren was a native of New York, had served his State in various 
offices of trust, including that of Governor, had been its Representative in the 
United States Senate, had been Minister to England, Secretary of State during 




MAR I IN VAN l:l!RI-.N 



WILLIAM HENRY HARRISOX—JOHN TYLER. 



635 



most of Jackson's first administration, and Vice-President during his second. He 
continued, for several years after the close of his terms as President, to take 
an active part in politics, and in 1848 he was the candidate of the anti- 
slavery Democrats, or "Free Democracy," for President, after which he took 
no part in public affairs, though he lived at his native place, in Columbia 
County, New York, until nearly the middle of the war of the Rebellion. 

For forty years the Democrats had retained control of the national 
government, but the administration of Van Buren had not been popular, 
and the change in public sentiment was so great that in the election of 1 840 
he was defeated by General 
William Henry Harrison, who 
had been the unsuccessful candi- 
date four years before. The 
political campaign was the most 
exciting that had yet occurred ; 
the enthusiasm for the Whig 
candidate was very great, and 
the " Log-cabin and Hard Cider " 
campaign will be long remem- 
bered. 

The character of the suc- 
cessful candidate justified high 
expectations of his administra- 
tion. Left at an early age to 
depend upon himself he had 
entered the army and won dis- 
tinction under General Wayne, 
in the Indian wars ; he had been 
long identified with the develop- 
ment of what is now Indiana 
and Ohio; had represented Ohio 
in the United States Senate, and 

filled several other offices of more or less note, and was living, when elected, 
on his farm, not far from Cincinnati. He made a judicious selection of Cabinet 
officers, but within a month after his inauguration, and before any definite line 
of policy had been established, he died, after a very brief illness, probably- 
caused by the fatigue and excitement of his inauguration. 

John Tyler was the first Vice President of the United States to become 
President. He had been made the Whig candidate largely from motives of 
policy, as he had been an active Democrat, and as a member of that party had 
been elected Governor of Virginia, and had represented that State in the 




WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON. 

1 773-1841. 

One Month, 1841. 



6 3 6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



United States Senate. He had, however, been opposed to both Jackson and Van 
Buren, and had for some time been acting with the Whigs. He soon quarreled, 
however, with the Whig Congress, the subject of contention being the proposed 
revival of the United States Bank. This quarrel continued throughout the 
Presidential term, to the great hindrance of public business. Two events which 
marked a new era, the one in our methods of communication, the other in the 
relief of human suffering, took place during this time ; they were the invention 
of the electric telegraph, and the use of ether in surgery. The events of 
greatest political importance were the settlement, by the Ashburton treaty, 

_, of a troublesome dispute with 



Great Britain, concerning the 
northeastern boundary of the 
United States, and just at the 
close of Tyler's administration, 
the annexation of Texas. The 
latter was a step which had for 
some time been under discus- 
sion, it being advocated by the 
South as a pro-slavery measure, 
and opposed by the anti-slavery 
party. Texas had made itself 
independent of Mexico, and 
asked to be annexed to the 
United States, a request which 
was thus finally granted. Mr.. 
Tyler returned to private life at 
the close of his Presidential term, 
and took little part in public 
affairs until the breaking out of 
the Civil War. At the time of 
his death he was a member of 
the Confederate Congress. 
The Democrats were again successful in 1844, and on March 4th, 1845. 
James K. Polk became the eleventh President. He was a native of North 
Carolina, but in boyhood had removed with his father to Tennessee. He was 
well educated, and was unusually successful in his profession of the law. He 
was for fourteen years a member of Congress and was Speaker of the House 
for five consecutive sessions. On his declining a re-election to Congress he 
was made Governor of Tennessee, and as a candidate for the Presidency 
in 1S44 was successful in uniting the warring factions of the Democrats. 
He came to the Presidency at a critical time. The annexation of Texas had 




JOHN TYLER. 
•Partial Term, 1841 



ZACHARY TAYLOR. 



637 



involved the country in difficulties with Mexico, and the question of the 
northern boundary west of the Rocky Mountains threatened to interrupt the 
cordial relations between the United States and England. The latter question 
was settled by accepting the parallel of forty-nine degrees of north latitude, 
thus making the boundary continuous with that east of the mountains, but 
the trouble with Mexico culminated in war, which resulted, in less than two 
years, in the complete conquest of that country. California and New Mexico 
were ceded to the United States on the payment of fifteen millions of dollars 
and the assumption of certain debts of Mexico. It was just at this time that 
gold was discovered in California, 
and the wonderful emigration to 
that territory began. Mr. Polk 
survived his Presidential term 
only some three months. 

The pendulum of popular 
favor had again swung over to 
the side of the Whigs, and their 
candidate was elected the twelfth 
President. General Zachary Tay- 
lor had grown up amid the pri- 
vation and difficulties of frontier 
life in Kentucky. By the in- 
fluence of Madison, the then 
Secretary of State, who was a 
relative of the family, he received 
an appointment as lieutenant in 
the United States army, and 
served with great distinction in 
the Indian wars which then ha- 
rassed our frontiers. At the 
time of the annexation of Texas 
he was in command of the army 

in the Southwest, with the rank of Brigadier-General. His management of 
affairs during the time which preceded the Mexican War was marked by great 
discretion, and his brilliant conduct of the opening campaign brought him 
great popularity and led to his nomination for the Presidency by the Whigs, 
to the great chagrin of some of the leaders of the party, who saw in 
his success the disappointment of their own ambition, and who distrusted 
a candidate who had no experience in legislative or executive affairs. 
This distrust, however, has not been shared by the majority ot the 
people, either in the case of General Taylor, or of other Presidential 




JAMES t»)X POLK. 

1795-I849- 
O/u- Term, 1845-1849. 



6 3 8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



candidates of purely military renown, and such a candidate has usually 
been sure of success. 

Tht: question of the extension of slavery was again being fiercely agitated, 
and seemed once more likely to disrupt the country. General Taylor lived 
only some sixteen months after his inauguration, dying before the heat of the 
debate in Congress had abated. 

The Vice-President who by the death of General Taylor came to be the 
Chief Magistrate of the country, was Millard Fillmore, of New York. He was 
an admirable type of the American citizen, owing this high position to his own 

attainments, and to his own un- 
aided exertions. He received 
no pecuniary assistance after his 
fourteenth year, except a small 
loan, which he punctually repaid. 
With exceedingly little previous 
education, he began, at the age 
of nineteen, the study of law, 
which he prosecuted under the 
most adverse circumstances, but 
so successfully as to place him 
in the front rank of the lawyers 
of the State of New York. He 
was for several terms a member 
of the lower house of Congress, 
where he distinguished himself 
as a wise, prudent, honest legis- 
lator. He was Chairman of the 
Committee on Ways and Means 
which framed the tariff of 1842, 
and although he claimed no 
originality for the principles on 
which it was based, he is justly 
entitled to be considered its author. 

His Presidential term is chiefly remembered by the debate in Congress on 
the extension of slavery in the territory gained by the Mexican War, resulting 
in the adoption of the compromise measures proposed by Henry Clay, including 
the Fugitive Slave Faw. This law, which gave the owners of runaway slaves 
the right to call on all citizens to assist in arresting and restoring them to 
their owners, was exceedingly unpopular in the North, and did much to 
prevent Mr. Fillmore's renomination, ami to increase anti-slavery sentiment 
in the North. 




ZACHARY TAYLOR. 
.784-1850. 
One Partial Term, 1849-1 



FRAXXLIX PIERCE. 



639 



Mrs. Stowe's famous story, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was published in 1852, 
and had a great influence in hastening the impending conflict. At the close of 
his term Mr. Fillmore retired to Buffalo, where he resided until his death, 
in 1874. 

Again the Whigs were retired from control of the national government 
and a Democratic President elected. Franklin Pierce had been a life Ion- 
resident of New Hampshire. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, was 
widely known as an able and successful lawyer, and though his name is not 
especially connected with any great measure, he had represented his State in 
both Houses of Congress. He 
expressed in his inaugural ad- 
dress the belief that all ques- 
tions concerning slavery should 
be considered settled by the 
compromise measures of 1850, 
and the hope that "no sectional 
or ambitious, or fanatical excite 
ment might again threaten the 
durability of our institutions or 
obscure the light of our pros- 
perity." 

Among the notable events 
of his administration may be 
mentioned the international ex- 
hibition in the " Crystal Palace " 
in New York, in 1853, in which 
the pre-eminence of Americans 
in the invention of labor-saving 
machinery was manifested ; the 
expedition of Commodore Perry 
to Japan, which resulted in open- 
ing to American commerce the 

ports of that interesting country, which no foreigners had previously been 
allowed to enter; and the adjustment of a dispute with Mexico concerning the 
western portion of the boundary between the two countries, resulting in the 
purchase by the United States of a considerable district, included in the 
present territories of Arizona and New Mexico. But the facts which chiefly 
characterize this administration concern the irrepressible conflict about slavery. 
The Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise, and 
made the question of slavery in all the Territories optional with the people 
of the Territories, as had been done by the Compromise of 1850, for the 




MII.l.ARIi I'll I MOR] 



One Partial Tet 



640 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



territory acquired from Mexico. The passage of this law led to much ill- 
feeling and to great efforts by both Northern abolitionists and Southern 
slaveholders to encourage the emigration of their sympathizers to Kansas, in 
order to govern the decision in regard to slavery. The strife of these opposing 
parties became so serious as to result in much bloodshed, and from 1854 to 
1859 that territory deserved the name of " Bleeding Kansas," and during much 
of that time it was in a state of civil war. 

Mr. Pierce took no prominent part in public affairs after his retirement 
from the Presidency. The Whig party had now finally disappeared, and in the 

election of 1856 the Democrats 
were once more successful. 
James Buchanan was a Pennsyl- 
vania lawyer, a graduate of 
Dickinson College, and so promi- 
nent in his profession that his 
name appears in the " Pennsyl- 
vania Reports" between 18 12 
and 1 83 1 more frequently than 
that of any other lawyer. He 
had served ten years in Congress, 
had represented his country as 
Minister to Russia and to Eng- 
land, and as Secretary of State 
under President Polk had been 
called upon to adjust questions 
of the gravest and most delicate 
character. 

At the opening of his Ad- 
ministration the public strife was 
greatly allayed by the general 

1B04-18O8. ^ j j j cr» 

a™ Term, 1SS3-.857 confidence in the ability and the 

high patriotism of the President ; 
but the announcement of the " Dred Scott Decision," which had been 
deferred so as not to give new cause for excitement during a Presidential 
campaign, stirred the nation to a degree before unknown. This decision 
declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and therefore void, that 
Congress had no right to forbid the carrying of slaves into any State or 
Territory, and opened all the Free States to at least a temporary establishment 
of slavery. This was the beginning of the end of the contest. The attempt 
of John Brown, a citizen of Kansas, with about twenty men, to liberate the 
slaves in Virginia, their seizure of the Government buildings at Harper's 




FRANKLIN TILKCE. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



641 



Ferry, their capture, and the hanging of the leader, with six of his men, only 
hastened the final conflict. 

A great business panic occurred in 1857, and the discovery of silver in 
Nevada and Colorado the following year ; the no less important discovery of 
petroleum and natural gas in Pennsylvania occurred in 1859. 

After the Presidential election of i860 it became evident that the South 
would not quietly submit to the defeat which they had received, and South 
Carolina, followed by six other Southern States, adopted "ordinances of seces- 
sion," assuming to dissolve their union with the other States, and declaring 
themselves free and independent 
nations. The President took 
no action to prevent secession, 
and most of the forts, arsenals, 
and other national property with- 
in these States were seized. Mr. 
Buchanan retired to private life 
at the close of his term as Presi- 
dent. 

Of all the men, since Wash- 
ington, who have been Presi- 
dents of the United States, Abra- 
ham Lincoln holds the largest 
share in the affections of the 
people. His lowly origin, his 
early poverty and privation, the 
never-failing kindness with which 
throughout his life he met all 
classes of men, and the homely 
and genial wit which enlivened 
his discussion of grave matters 
of State as well as his casual 
and friendly conversation, gave 

him a place in the hearts of the common people not held by any other 
American, while his unequaled knowledge ot men, his ability to cope with 
unforeseen difficulties, his lofty purpose and perfect honesty, together with 
his practical good sense, not only brought him the respect and esteem of all 
who came to know him, but place him amnn^ the greatest statesmen, not of 
America alone, but of all countries in all times. 

Born and reared in the backwoods, with nothing in his surroundings to 
stimulate ambition, chopping wood and splitting rails, learning to read from the 
spelling-book and the Bible, sitting up half the night to read Pilgrim's Progress 

41 




JAMES BUCHANAN. 

1 791-1868. 
One Term, 1857-1861. 



642 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and /Esop's Fables " by the blaze of the logs his own axe had split," he came 
to manhood with little education, but with perfect health and gigantic strength. 
At the age of twenty-five he took up the study of law, and early began to take 
part in the local political movements. He had represented his district in 
Congress, but at the time of his nomination for President had little reputation 
outside of Illinois. 

He came to the Presidency amid a multitude of adverse circumstances. 
With seven States already seceded, the border States apparently ready to follow, 
with the capital surrounded by a hostile population, and without the confidence 
of the leaders of his own party, his would indeed seem a difficult task. His 
first measures were intended to convince the people of the South, if they were 
willing to be convinced, that he had no hostile intention, but at the same time 
that he proposed to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Union and to main- 
tain the rights and the authority of the Government. The story of the War of 
the Rebellion cannot be told here. It is a story the like of which forms part of 
the history of no other nation — the story of a war engaging at one time 
1,700,000 men, the war debt of the North, representing but a part of the cost 
of the war, amounting to $3,000,000,000, and the expense frequently exceed- 
ing $3,500,000 a day. 

Aside from the essentially military features of the war, the most notable 
event of Mr. Lincoln's Administration was the freeing of the slaves, which was 
done as a war measure, by the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, thus 
finally, after the expiration of nearly a hundred years, making good in our 
country the words of the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are cre- 
ated equal." 

It can be truthfully said that President Lincoln carried the administration 
of the Government in this troublous time, not only as a load upon his brain, 
but as a burden in his heart ; a united country was the object of all his efforts, 
and when, only a month after his second inauguration, he was assassinated by a 
misguided and mistaken Southern sympathizer, the bullet of the murderer 
removed as true a friend as the South possessed. The war was already at an 
end, and had Abraham Lincoln lived to rebuild and reconstruct the Union he 
had saved, many of the difficulties of the era of reconstruction might have been 
avoided — difficulties whose evil effects have not yet disappeared from our 
national politics. 

No fact in our history demonstrates more fully the perfection of our system 
of government and the hold which it has upon the confidence of our people 
than the quiet change of Chief Magistrates at the close of a Presidential term. 
Four times in our history this change has been caused by death, and now, when 
the beloved President had been assassinated, when the whole country was 
excited and alarmed, when grave questions were pending and matters of the 




ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

1809-1865. 

Two Terms {Died in Office), 1861-1865. 



644 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



utmost delicacy required adjustment, the Vice-President quietly assumed the 
office, and the routine of government proceeded as before. 

Andrew Johnson was a native of North Carolina. He was the son of poor 
parents, and, learning the tailor's trade, he earned his living for a number of 
years as a journeyman. He taught himself to read, and after emigrating 
to Tennessee he learned from his wife to write and cipher. He represented his 
district for several terms in Congress, and was chosen United States Senator in 
1857. He was nominated for Vice-President by the Republicans in 1864, 
mainly to invite votes from the opposite party, as until the war he had been a 

consistent Democrat. Unfortu- 
nately, he differed with the lead- 
ing Republicans in Congress on 
the question of the manner in 
which the States lately in rebel- 
lion.were to resume their places 
in the Government, and the 
difference grew into a violent 
quarrel, which lasted till the 
close of his term, and resulted, 
in 1868, in the impeachment of 
the President by Congress. He 
was acquitted, however, the vote 
in the Senate lacking one of the 
two-thirds necessary to convict. 
The chief political events of the 
Administration were . the read- 
mission of six of the seceded 
States and the adoption of three 
amendments to the Constitution 
— the Thirteenth, abolishing 
slavery ; the Fourteenth, making 
the negro a citizen, and the 
Fifteenth, giving him the right to vote. (See Chapter on Negro.) 

During this time, also, the Government began the payment of the 
war debt, the first Atlantic cable was laid, and Alaska was added to our 
national domain. 

rhe success which had attended the Union armies after they passed under 
the command of ( General Ulysses S. Grant made him the popular idol, and obvi- 
ously the most available candidate for President. He was a native of Ohio, a 
graduate of West Point, and had served in the Mexican War, where he was 
promoted for meritorious conduct in battle At the opening of the Civil War 




ANDREW JOHNSON. 
1808-1875. 
One Partial Term, 1865-1 



ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT. 



645 



he raised, a company of volunteers in Illinois, of which State he was then a 
citizen, was soon made a brigadier general, and irum that point the story of 
his life is a part of the history of the war. 

General Grant was the recipient of honors from foreign rulers and govern 
merits such as have been bestowed upon no other American President. His 
fame as a general was recognized throughout the world, and although he had 
no experience in civil affairs, he had the tact to call into his Cabinet men of great 
ability, and while he may have been sometimes misled by designing men, his 
Administration was so popular that he was re-elected by a greatly-increased 
majority, and indeed might have 
been chosen for a third term had 
not the public feeling been found 
so strongly opposed to violating 
the custom inaugurated by Wash- 
ington of giving to no President 
more than two terms of office. 
During these two terms the first 
Pacific railway was completed ; 
representatives from all the re- 
maining seceded States were 
admitted to Congress ; a treaty- 
was concluded with England 
providing for the arbitration of 
the Alabama and other claims, 
which seemed at one time likely 
to involve the two countries in 
war ; the great fires in Chicago 
and Boston destroyed many mil- 
lions of property ; a panic of 
almost unprecedented severity 
occurred (1873), and the Cen- Two Ttrms, 1869-1877. 

tennial Exhibition took place at 

Philadelphia. After the close of his term as President, General Grant made 
a tour of the world, being everywhere received with the greatest honor, after 
which he resided in New York until attacked by the disease which ended his 
life on Mt. MacGregor, in 1885. 

It has frequently happened that when several rival leaders of the same 
political party have been candidates for President, the Presidential Convention 
has found it wisest to nominate some less prominent man, thus avoiding the 
loss which might result from the choice of either of the more conspicuous 
aspirants for the office, and the consequent offense to the supporters of the 




ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT. 



6 4 6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



others. This was the case when a successor to General Grant was to be 
chosen. While Rutherford B. Hayes had been a Brigadier-general in the 
Union army, and had twice been elected Governor of Ohio, he was by no 
means conspicuous as a national leader. There was great dissatisfaction 
with the course of the men who had obtained control of the political 
machinery of the Republican party, and the election depended on the counting 
of the electoral votes of Louisiana and Florida. To settle the legality of these 
votes, the famous Electoral Commission was appointed by Congress, and 
decided in favor of General Hayes as against his competitor, Samuel J. Tilden. 

^^^ The quiet and peaceful solution 
| of this dispute is one of the 
| greatest triumphs of our system 
j of Government. The Republican 
I party had been in office for four 
Presidential terms, had success- 
fully conducted the affairs of the 
j nation during the trying and 
dangerous periods of the Civil 
War and Reconstruction. Many 
! of the measures which had been 
| during this time adopted as a 
part of our system had been 
| consistently and strenuously op- 
posed by the Democrats. Under 
these circumstances the Repub- 
licans viewed the possible ac- 
cession to power of the Demo- 
cratic party with a degree of 
alarm, which has since proved to 
be unjustifiable. Each party 

IB22 -* * ' 

on,- Term, .8 77 -i88i. claimed, and probably believed, 

that its candidate had been 
elected, and each was disposed to insist on its rights under the Constitution. 
Such a dispute in a country where men's passions are less under the control 
of their reason, would inevitably have led to civil war. The two Houses of 
Congress were of different politics, and their agreement upon what seemed an 
equitable method of adjusting the dispute, together with the acquiescence of 
all parties in the decision of the tribunal thus created, make it a remarkable 
instance of the adaptability of our institutions, and go far to justify the most 
complete faith in their permanence. General Hayes was a successful lawyer, a 
lifelong citizen of Ohio, and while his administration gave great offense to 




RUTHERFORIi BURCHARD HAYES. 



JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD. 



647 



many political leaders, it was generally satisfactory to the people. At the 
close of his term he retired to his native State, where he still resides. 

The chief events of his Presidency were : his withdrawal of troops from 
the South, thus leaving the people of that section to settle their own questions 
in their own way ; the great railroad and coal strikes, during which United States 
troops had to be employed to suppress violence at Pittsburgh, and the resumption 
of specie payments, in 1879. (See Chapter on Finance.) 

The twentieth President was likewise a citizen of Ohio. The early life of 
James A. Garfield was somewhat similar to that of Abraham Lincoln. He had, 
however, the advantage of early 
contact with cultivated people, 
and while he at one time drove 
mules upon the tow-path of a 
canal, and paid for his tuition by 
acting as janitor of the school- 
house, he had opportunities for 
education of which he availed 
himself to the utmost, paying his 
own way through school and 
finally graduating at Williams 
College. At the opening of the 
war he entered the Union army, 
and was promoted, for his servi- 
ces at the battle of Chickamauga, 
to the rank of Major-general. 
He left the army to enter Con- 
gress, where he took a leading 
part, and was chosen Senator 
for Ohio, but before taking his 
seat was elected President. He 
surrounded himself with able 
advisers, and high hopes were 

entertained of a notably successful Administration, when he was shot by a 
disappointed office-seeker, dying after two months of suffering, during which the 
public sympathy was excited to an extraordinary degree and was manifested in 
every possible way. 

The single event for which the few months of his Presidency are remarkable 
is the quarrel between the President and Senator Conkling, of New York, 
as to some of the Federal appointments in that State. The Senator from 
New York resigned, and the difficulty was not adjusted at the time of the 
President's death. 




648 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



The Vice-President elected with Garfield was Chester A. Arthur, of New 
York. He was not widely known outside his own State before his nomination, 
and he was made the candidate in order to retain the favor of a large portion 
of the 'Republican party in New York which had advocated the claims of another 
candidate, and it was feared would not otherwise assist in the election of 
Garfield. 

Mr. Arthur had great experience as a political manager, but little knowl- 
edge of the manner in which the Government is conducted ; but he proved a 
careful, conscientious President, and the country was well satisfied with his 

administration. As he had been 
an adherent of the political faction 
with which President Garfield, at 
the time of his assassination, was 
at war, he was placed in an ex- 
ceedingly delicate position, and 
grave fears were entertained by 
many people that backward steps 
would be taken ; but the new 
President extricated himself from 
his difficulties with a dignity and 
a tact which astonished even 
those who knew him best, and 
which gained for him the respect 
of the entire country. 

During the term of President 
Arthur, Congress passed the Civil 
Service Act, providing for the 
appointment of subordinate em- 
ployees of the Government on 
the basis of merit rather than 
that of political influence ; the 
completion of the great East 
River Bridge united the cities of New York and Brooklyn, and the immense 
growth and prosperity of the New South justified the brightest anticipations 
for the future of that section. Mr. Arthur died in New York a lew months 
after the close of his term. 

The Republican party had now held control of the Government for twenty- 
five years, and Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic President since 
Buchanan. Although a native of New jersey, he has been since boyhood a 
citizen of New York. He began the study of law in Buffalo at the age of 
eighteen, and early took an active part in politics. Having filled several local 




CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR. 

1830-1886. 
One Partial Term, 1881-1885. 



G ROVER CLEVELAND— BENJAMIN IIARRISOK 



649 



offices, he was, in 1882, elected Governor of the State by a phenomenal ma- 
jority, and in 1 884 was the successful candidate for President. 

The transfer of the Government from the hands of one political party 
to its opponent resulted in no disturbance to the business or social relations 
of the people, and although a large number of office-holders were replaced 
bv men of the opposite political faith, the business of the Government 
went on as before. 

During Cleveland's administration laws were enacted providing for the 
succession to the Presidency of the various members of the Cabinet in case of 
the death or disability of the 
President and Vice-President : 
laying down rules for the count- 
ing of the electoral votes, thus 
supplying the strange deficiency 
of the Constitution in this re- 
spect ; regulating inter-State com- 
merce, and forbidding Chinese 
laborers to emigrate to this 
country. Events of great im- 
portance were the extended labor 
strikes, which occurred in 18S6, 
and the Anarchist riot in Chicago 
in May of that year. Although 
his administration had been very 
satisfactory to the country at 
large, Mr. Cleveland failed of 
re-election, the principal ques- 
tion at issue being that of a 
protective tariff. He left Wash- 
ington to take up the practice 
of law in New York city. Fini Term lWi _ lS £'. Second Term . , 393 _ 

Mr. Cleveland was suc- 
ceeded by General Benjamin Harrison, who secured 233 electoral votes to 168 
cast for Mr. Cleveland. Mr. Harrison is the grandson of the ninth President, 
and the great-grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. He is a native of Ohio, is well educated, and was for many years one 
of the leading lawyers of Indiana. He entered the Union army in 1S62, and 
was promoted until, near the close of the war, he reached the rank of Brigadier- 
general. He was made a United States Senator in 1S80, and came to the 
Presidency well equipped for the discharge of its duties. 

During his four years of service many events have taken place which 




STEDIFN r.ROVKK riFYFLANIl. 



650 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



promise to have great weight in moulding the future of the country. A Con- 
gress of the American Republics met in Washington, in 1889, and devised 
^^^^^ measures by which it is hoped to 

, I bring about a closer commercial 
1 union between the Americas ; six 
new States have been added to 
the Union ; the tariff laws have 
been revised and clauses added 
granting to such nations as offer 
us reciprocal advantages free, 
admission for certain of their 
exports ; the country is being 
rapidly furnished with a new 
and efficient navy ; the long- 
standing difficulty with England 
concerning seal fishing in Behring 
Sea has been adjusted by a 
treaty providing for arbitration, 
and annoying difficulties with 
Germany, Italy and Chili have 
been happily settled. 

The twenty-three men who 
have filled the Presidential chair 
one Term, 1S89-1893. have varied in ability ; they have 

represented all classes of our 
American people and widely different schools of political thought, but in 
the century of their aggregate terms no country of the world has had better 
men as chief executives. 

The Presidential campaign of 1892 was remarkable in several respects. 
The leading candidates, ex-President Cleveland and President Harrison, were 
both men of the highest character and integrity, each of whom had served the 
country with notable ability as President for a term of four years. The people 
were, therefore, so well acquainted with the candidates that personalities entered 
little into the campaign, and the canvass was conducted with less popular en- 
thusiasm ami excitement than ever before. The question most largely discussed 
was that of the McKinley tariff, but other important questions, such as the free, 
coinage of silver and the revival of State banks, entered largely into the dis- 
cussion, and had much to do with influencing the result, especially in the Western 
States, where party lines were very largely broken up. The result of the elec- 
tion was almost a political revolution, ex-President Cleveland being -elected by 
an overwhelming majority. The Populists also polled a very large vote. 




BEN] W1IN HARRIS 



CLEVELAND'S SECOND TERM. 651 

The result of the election was generally accepted as meaning a condemnation 
of the McKinley tariff. For the first time in thirty years the Democratic party 
had full possession of all branches of the government. 

In the spring and summer oi 1 S q 3 the country experienced an unexpected 
and remarkable stringency in the money market, which was largely attributed to 
the operations of what is known as the Sherman Law, by which the Government 
was compelled to purchase four and one-half million ounces ot silver every 
month. President Cleveland called an extra session of Congress to meet early in 
August, for the purpose of repealing the purchasing clause of the " Sherman 
Law." This appeared to bring some relief in the way of restoring confidence, 
but it did not come until the country had suffered greatly from the general 
depression of trade and the withdrawal of credits. The banks in New York, 
Philadelphia, and Boston declined to pay large sums on the checks oi their 
customers in currency, but insisted upon payments being accepted in Clearing 
House certificates. President Cleveland was very generally commended for his 
wise and patriotic action in dealing with the questions affecting the public 
interest during this critical period, though he met with serious opposition 
within his own party. 




CHAPTER XXXVII. 

TRAVEL IN OLD TIMES A.MD NEW. 

/pjW- "«v HE history of steam is the story of American progress, — a story, 
" SPjET' '*- can ^ e tru b' s ^id, in no wise devoid of historic and dramatic 
interest. The difference between the records and statistics of 
travel and its narrative, is the difference between a map and 'a 
picture. But before steam, came the slower methods of our 
fathers, who were content to travel at the snail's pace of five 
miles an hour, while we rush through the world at the rate of 
fifty-five miles an hour. This statement is like a bit of string ; you may tie up 
a bundle of figures or a bundle of romances with it, as you please ; it will cover 
them both. People's journeys, whether they be journeys across the street or 
across the ocean, are among the facts that make human life interesting. Few 
of us care to remember the exact width of the street or of the ocean. We ask 
about the haps and mishaps by the way, — especially the mishaps — and value 
most that adventure which we are least likely to care to repeat. 

THE TURNPIKE. 

Highways and turnpikes alone connected inland settlements in earlier 
times, when American towns were scattered and small, and sober citizens 
made their wills before they would venture a hundred miles from home. Those 
who had coaches made their tours in patrician fashion, disdaining the common 
vehicles of ordinary people ; but for the most the great lumbering stage-coach, 
modeled somewhat after the English style, was luxury enough. It carried a 
motley assembly. Demure little maids, with their knitted hands properly 
crossed on their neat little aprons, and excitement on their fresh, young faces 
hidden by the overshadowing poke bonnets, made long holiday pilgrimages 
of fifty miles or so with more trepidation than their granddaughters would 
betray in crossing the continent. Young men bound for Harvard or Princeton ; 
old men, betraying by the color or cut of coat or breadth of brim the lawyer, 
clergyman, or merchant, exchanged their little store of news as they met in 
travel. Few but gentlefolk made journeys in those days, so that the amenities 
of travel might be safely indulged in. 

653 



6 54 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Nearly every house passed on the way in those times was the scene of 
some tale more or less thrilling, or suggested some episode of a former 
journey. There were excitements to break the monotony of travel. There 
were the snow block in winter, the broken bridges, the floods that rendered 
the highway impassable, or the accident that left the company stranded, 
between inns, a prey to anxious fears lest some Dick Turpin of the locality 
would end the adventure for them ; for sometimes the stage coach would 
come to a sudden halt. 

Some bold highwayman, who could fire just as many shots as he had 




TURNPIKE IN THE BLUE GRASS REGION OF KENTUCKY. 



pistols, would put the travelers to the trouble of disembarking and delivering 
over their valuables. An old flint-lock horse-pistol does not look like a formid- 
able weapon, as we, who have been educated up to the modern revolver, examine 
it in a case of some museum, but to our fathers it must have appeared, when 
seen in the dusk of the evening, in the hands of some desperate robber, as 
large as a cannon and liable to scatter death and destruction, even if it did have 
a way of flashing in the pan at times. 

Many a tale of a wayside inn has come down to us from the stage-coach 
days, of eccentric inn-keepers, strange encounters, whimsical travelers. War 



ISOLATED CONDITION OF COUNTRY PLACES. 655 

stories, love stories, ghost stories, all have had their scenes laid in some 
old inn. No modern hotel, with its conveniences and comforts, its perfect 
service and great size, its elevators, electric bells, and appliances of 
later civilization, can equal in importance the little inn by the side of the 
turnpike. 

The tavern-keeper was an autocrat. His opinion it was never safe to 
cross. The tap-room of the inn was to the villager of long ago what a daily 
paper is to us, for into it flowed the latest advices, political or social gossip 
from remote regions, or whatever intelligence the traveler of the stage-coach 
might bring. It was no uncommon thing for intelligence of important matters, 
such as the removal of a Governor or the election of a President, to travel a 
hundred miles in a week. As already intimated, the traveler was the great 
vehicle for the communication of news, as well as of ideas. 

ISOLATED CONDITION OF COUNTRY PLACES. 

It is difficult for us to conceive of the loneliness and stagnation of many 
country places. Those which were away from the main thoroughfares were 
more isolated than are the far frontier settlements of our Western country 
to-day. The village in which Rip Van Winkle passed his days before he went 
to sleep in the mountains is not at all an exaggerated picture. The average 
village possessed few advantages for its youth. Educational facilities were very 
meagre, and intellectual life was resolved to its simplest elements. The village 
church, the winter school, the rare books and rarer pictures, the chance traveler, 
who told wonderful tales of city life and the great world across the sea, and who 
was remembered for years, even as Hawthorne remembered in his old age the 
chance guests at his father's house, these were all. And when one of the boys 
left home he must, indeed, have been of small account for whom each neighbor 
did not have a word of advice, or the pastor forgot to offer prayer in the 
meeting house. 

From "A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago, "published in Scribner s Magazine 
in 1S87, a letter is quoted which describes the carriage drive from Salem to 
Francistown, New Hampshire, en route to Saratoga Springs. "We are now on 
a new turnpike road from Amherst to Dartmouth," the writer says. "We 
passed through several pretty villages on coming here, though it is almost a 
new country, hardly cleared up, except a small village every six or seven miles. 
Here, as I look around me, I see nothing but enormous hills, covered with trees' 1 
and almost mingling with the clouds." In another place the narrator refers to 
one of the public works of the day in the following terms: "We had a fine 
view of the famous Middlesex canal, which in future ages must do honor to our 
country. Such monuments of industry and perseverance raise our opinion 
of our countrymen. It will be twenty-five miles in length when completed, 



656 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



running from Deckkel to Medford River. Boats pass every day and parties 
of pleasure are always sailing on it." 

No man knew more of the difficulties of travel than the old post-rider, and 
it may be conceded that no one knew more about the comforts of the stopping 
places along the route, for, by virtue of his calling, he was everywhere a wel- 
come comer. He carried not only the mail, but messages that were often of 
far greater importance ; he was at once confidant, reporter, detective, and 
news purveyor for his district. We who clamor for a mail delivery at least 
twice a day, may ponder on the situation of those who looked for the post's 
steady nag once a week, or perhaps twice a month. He had important letters 
to transport. It would not do for him to show any unseemly haste in attending 
to his duties. While we speak in the past tense of the post-rider, and are apt 
to poke fun at his slow ways, let us say in parenthesis that even to-day, in parts 
of our country remote from the great centres of life, and especially in certain 

portions of the far South, there 
are hundreds of people who live 
at a distance of ten, fifteen, or 
twenty miles from any post-office, 
who sometimes do not receive a 
mail more than once in a fortnight, 
and who have to depend upon the 
services of some irresponsible boy 
to get their letters and papers 
even then. A case which recently 
came to the notice of the writer, 
in South Carolina, is to the point. 
In one district, covering a radius 
of eighteen or twenty miles from the post-office, the mail delivery was entrusted 
to negroes principally, and one of these, a boy of about fifteen years of age, 
habitually drove the little bullock which served him for a steed into the woods, 
where he would enjoy a siesta, until some of his waiting patrons became 
anxious at the delay and went to hunt him up. 

Here seems a fitting place for recording the story of Jacob the Roman, in 
which the post-rider figures as a sort of Dutch Hermes. The story is told 
by the Rev. Dr. John Knox Allen, of Tarrytown. 

" lust at the foot of the high point called Kyk-uit* there long ago dwelt a 
man who was called Jacob the Rowan. He was a German by birth, and in the 

* " Lookout," now mispronounced Knkc-out ; a name given to a sharply defined hill at Tarry- 
town, on the Hudson, rising about 500 feet above the river, and situated about three-quarters of a 
mile due east from the river. It was once a coast-survey station, and was used in early times by 
the Indians as a signal hill. 




JHA1SE OK THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
■,w "L'Arl d;i Menuisicr-Carrossier." i 77 t I 



The story of ja cob the roman. 657 

centuries past his ancestors had come, perhaps with Julius Caesar, from Koine, 
and after the conclusion of the war with the Gauls had settled anion- the now 
friendly War-men, whom we to-day call German. Living in the highlands of 
Southern Germany, the old name still clung to them. "Jacob the Roman" was 
well educated, but he was poor. I le was respected in his native town and had 
won the affection of the Herr Obermeister's lovely daughter— her name Judah 
Trenagh. But poverty hindered the progress of his suit, and he determined to 
try his fortunes in this new world. Judah would not be left behind. By night 
they left the town, and traveling by unfrequented paths at last reached the 
coast. But now their money was exhausted. Nothing daunted, they secured 
their passage across the ocean by articles of agreement with the captain of a 
vessel, which articles allowed him to sell the two for a term of years to whoever 
in this land would pay the price of their passage, and secure it from the pro- 
ceeds of their labor. This was no unusual thing in that day. Those thus sold 
were called Redemptioners, because the price of their redemption from bondage 
was fixed at so much labor, or its equivalent in money. A calamity not antici- 
pated befell them on arrival — they were sold away from each other. Exchang- 
ing vows of eternal fidelity, they parted. 

"In time (acob worked his freedom, and on the east side of Kyk-uit, near 
a little brook, bought a little homestead and built for himself a house. He had 
learned to speak the Low Dutch of the people, and as he was a tailor by trade 
they came to him to make their garments and to listen to his many stories (A~ 
life in the old world. He was respected by all ; he increased in goods, but was 
not happy. It was years since he had seen Judah. Where was she ? Was she' 
living? How should he ever find her? His former master told him he had 
heard she had been sold somewhere; west of the river. His love stimulated his 
wits. Anthony Segere was der Post-reiter, and made his monthly circuit with 
the colonial mail from New Amsterdam to Fort Orange, going up the wesl 
side of the river and down the east. Jacob confided in him, and the postman 
espoused his cause with sympathy, and promised to inquire in every village for 
"one Trenagh," according to the description Jacob gave him ; and if he found 
her, and she were willing, he promised to bring her back with him on his horse. 
For this service Jacob was to give him seven dollars in New York currency. 
Jacob showed him the money, ami laid it away against the demand. The post- 
man went and made inquiry, returning month after month on his steady old 
horse, and brought no news, facob's heart sank within him, just as do the 
hearts of people in more splendid romances. 

"At last the old postman met a man who thought he knew a woman who 

answered the description. He would see her, and if she were the one would 

bring her to Fort Orange against the time of the next circuit. Jacob was wild 

with excitement. Was this the woman or not? What joy or sorrow would the 

42 



6q« 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



postman bring him next month ? The month rolled round. The slow steed 
came ambling down the river-roads and up the hills, and bore Anthony and his 
saddle-bags, and on the pillion was seated Judah too. Any good novel will tell 
what they did when they met. 

"One incident is to be added. Judah often told how she attracted 
the attention of whole villages on the first day's ride on horseback from 
Fort Orange. She wondered why the people stared and smiled as they 
saw her, for she was a comely woman, and decently dressed. She asked 
the old postman why they were amused. He smiled. She was not an 
equestrian, and in her innocence supposed it was not possible to ride a horse 




AMERICAN STAGE-COACH OF 1795, FROM " WELD'S TRAVELS." 
(Probably Similar in Form to those of the Later Colonial Period ) 



safely except astride. And she had not liked to embrace the old man, and 
so had mounted looking the other way. It was hardly to be wondered at 
that the people smiled as they saw her clinging to the saddle-bags, and with 
her face turned toward the scenes they were fast, or rather slowly, leaving. 
The old postman showed her how to ride upon the pillion, and their journey 
ceased to attract especial attention. There was, of course, love in a cottage, 
though the furniture at first was little, one old chest, containing crockery and 
utensils, serving also as tailor's bench and table. Eight children were born to 
them. In his old age the good Jacob said one day : ' I prays mine Cott, I never 
knows a sick ped.' That very evening, as his wife approached to help him to 



CURIOUS FERRIES. 659 

bed, he met her with the old look of love, stretched out his hands to her, tried 
to speak, and was gone." :;: 

Not less remarkable than the primitive methods of the highway were those 
of the water-ways. On all the old crossings on small rivers the ford came first, 
the course of the road being made to accommodate itself to the shallows of the 
stream. After the ford was the bridge or the ferry, and the first ferries in use 
were simply large scows, such as we see in the old pictures of Washington 
crossing the Delaware. They were made strong enough to stand the buffeting 
of ice and to bear the weight of horses or cattle as well as people and freight. 
Usually these early ferry-boats were propelled by poles or sweeps, but some- 
times an inventive genius would run them by an endless cable, or even with 
paddle wheels that were turned by horse-power. Although the most important 
river crossings are now provided with comfortable steam ferry boats, yet we 
still find in some out-of-the-way places contrivances that make one think the 
world is taking a few revolutions backward. There is a ferry, for instance, in 
an upper county of New Jersey where the ferry-boat consists of a square-ended 
and flat-bottomed craft, that is connected by guide-lines to a rope that reaches 
from shore to shore. The rope is to prevent the scow from going down the 
stream, but, as the guide-lines are slack, each thrust of the poles that propel it 
turns it half way round, to the discomfort of those who cross on it and the 
increase of the ferryman's vocabulary. On another stream, in one of the 
Southern States, there is an old ferry-boat no less singular in its methods of 
propulsion. Like the one already described, the craft itself is simply a very 
large scow ; the flat ends are so constructed that they meet and fit exactly the 
ends of the wharf on either side, so that a team may be driven to the boat 
without alarming the horses. The unusual feature of this ferry is the way in 
which the boat with its cargo is moved across the rather rapid stream. A taut 
wire stretches from one shore to the other, a distance, perhaps, of a thousand 
feet, and the ferryman, clutching the wire with a notched stick, pulls the boat, 
load and all, across by main strength. What made this ferry still more inter- 
esting was the fact that the ferryman was always somewhere else when wanted, 
and it usually took half an hour of shouting and whistling and the assistance 
of half the people in the neighborhood to attract his attention and induce him 
to approach the landing place. 

* Rev. Dr. John K. Allen, the author of the above sketch, is at the present time pastor of the 
First Reformed Church, Tarrytown, N. Y., which includes the historic "Old Church of Sleepy 
Hollow," so widely made known by Washington Irving's description of the venerable pile in his 
immortal "Sketch Book." The story of Jacob the Roman is written from carefully authenticated 
data procured by Dr. Allen from old residents, all of whom have now passed away. We may add 
that Rev. Dr. John B. Thompson savs that in the church at Catskill, N. V., where for a time he 
ministered, descendants of the old Post-reiter are to be met with, all known by the name of Post. 



66o 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



There was a time in the United States when most of the people who lived 
on the shores of the larger rivers found it more convenient to travel by water 
than by land. To be sure, there was always the chance of being becalmed, or 
of running aground, or being ice-locked, or capsized, but these perils were, 
after all, less than those of the road. As on the road, so on river, the more 
important people had their own conveyances — sloops and schooners that were 
fitted for the purpose of carrying either freight or passengers. Indeed, some- 




si EEPING CAR INTERIOR; ON HIE WUiND1-.KI.AND route 

(A 'or thi 



Pa, ..,. 



DINING CAR INTERIOR; ON THE WONDERLAND ROUTE. 
Railroad.) 



times in the very early days the "yachts," as they were then called, of patroons 
and manor lords, or large proprietors, used to extend their voyages much further 
than the rivers upon which they started. Thus we have an account of the wife 
of one great landowner going upon a little vessel of a hundred tons as her 
husband's supercargo, taking charge of a consignment of furs and other Amer- 
ican produce to Holland and returning with goods from that country. 

There were regular passenger boats that were supposed to make their 
trips on something like schedule time, wind and weather permitting (but the 



THE ARISTOCRATIC SCHOOXER. 



66 1 



wind and weather never did permit), and these carried a great many people 
whose business or pleasure took them from home, but they did not carry all. 
A certain select few held aloof, more than it is the fashion to do at the present 
day, from contact with ordinary people, or perhaps it was rather from the 
discomforts which must be endured in common. 

A characteristic story comes to mind in which the principal actor was a 




MAMMOTH no] SPRINGS HOTEL, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK 
'Reached ly Northern Pacific Railroad i 



young girl who lived in the city of Hudson in the early part of the present 
century. Her father was one of the most influential and important gentlemen 
of that place. Although his position was too well assured for his consciousness 
of it ever to obtrude itself unpleasantly upon his neighbors, yet he had a very 
deep sense of what was due to his station, and this feeling exhibited itself most 
clearly when any matter came up which touched his favorite and only daughter. 



662 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

So it happened that upon her asking and obtaining permission to visit the city 
of New York, especial measures were taken to make her journey as pleasant 
and at the same time as free from disagreeable contact with strangers as 
possible. She approached the subject either innocently or with a little harm- 
less diplomacy in a way that shocked her good father, for she asked at what 
time the regular boat was to leave for the city of New York. Did her father 
propose to send her by the steamboat or by the stage coach ? " Neither," was 
the prompt reply. "When my daughter travels I hope I shall always be able to 
provide a suitable conveyance for her." So a special vessel was chartered, 
overhauled, and prepared for the voyage, and the young lady embarked en 
princesse on a long journey that nowadays is accomplished in three hours by 
the Central Railroad, and in ten by steamboat. But it took her a week in 
her comfortable schooner, through scenery that had lost little of its pristine 
wildness and beauty, on a river whose navigation was comparatively infrequent. 
It is little wonder that its incidents of calm and squall, its panorama of the 
Highlands, West Point, the wide-spreading Tappan Zee, the lofty Palisades, 
with all the attendant episodes and delays, were recalled with pleasure after 
nearly three-quarters of a century. 

MISSISSIPPI FLAT-BOATING. 

Other rivers have had their share of the interest and romance connected 
with tales of early travel, but none more than the Mississippi and its tributaries ; 
the varying flow of their waters, the shifting sand bars, the levees, bayous, 
delta, alone would make the narrative of travel upon them interesting. But 
we may add to these things the almost endless variety of conditions that existed 
in the life along their shores and the character of those who spent much of their 
time upon them. The Mississippi flat-boat has, after much adventure and many 
arduous voyages, been dry-docked in the pages of history. 

It was an exile from the start, going down that mighty current, but never 
coming back. The pioneer on the Ohio or the Tennessee ventured the cargo that 
was all his little wealth in such a craft, and sent or took it to New Orleans, a 
trip requiring not only weeks of time, but courage, coolness, and endurance on 
the part of the voyager. Abraham Lincoln once made that trip as a boatman, 
narrowly escaping wreck on one of the numerous snags of the river. Many 
other famous American has done the same. 

But long before the flat-boat of the pioneer another craft navigated those 
rapid waters, darting here and there like the fish .or the wild fowl, seeking, like 
them, the shadow of the overhanging forests on the banks. That was the birch 
canoe, which was the Genesis of navigation on American waters. 

When the great tidal wave rolled West in the "roaring forties," individuals, 
families, even communities, cut loose from all home ties, broke up old associa- 



THE SHIP OF THE PLAINS. 



66' 



tions and embarked on what might be called the great American Exodus. 
Their heavy prairie wagon has sometimes been named the " Schooner of the 




OPENING OF THE ERIE 
CANAL. 



Plains," and, indeed, when ^ 

equipped and victualled for the 

voyage across the continent, 

the simile implied in the name was not greatly strained. The creaking 

hull, surmounted by a great hood of canvas, naturally reminded one of a 



664 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

vessel, and to heighten this impression, the desert over which the emigrants 
crossed, with its dangerous storms and strange encounters, might well 
suggest the ocean. 

We pass through great romantic periods and do not recognize them till 
they are passed, but the narrative of the Donner party, or of hundreds that 
faced cold, starvation, and even death itself in that curious migration, cannot 
but make us wonder if history ever will have done with its dramatic chapters. 
The story of the Donner family has been told in detail too recently to make it 
necessary to repeat it here otherwise than in outline. Starting from the East 
in great, covered wagons, with all their property converted into movable shape, 
this family, which included three generations, accompanied by numerous friends, 
began their long journey across the continent. Although most of the men 
"were mounted on horseback, the pace of the caravan was regulated by the 
oxen which drew the wagons. As they progressed on their journey, family after 
family, wagon after wagon, was added to the cavalcade, until at last a long 
procession held its slow way toward the much talked of, hardly known, West. 
After they had once passed the further limits of civilization and got into the 
Indian country, their hardships multiplied from week to week; their cattle died 
,by the way, some of the party were taken sick, dissensions arose among them, 
winter overtook them, the savage nearly completed the work that their own 
improvidence, the inclemency of nature, and the length of the way had begun. 
Of the many who started few reached the Pacific slope alive. Their graves 
dotted the trail from Ohio to California, and theirs was not a singular story at 
that day. A motley procession were the pilgrims of '49. Women helpless 
with age and sickness, children not old enough to care what befell them, went 
through alive, while hundreds of strong men fell by the way. Some of the 
hooded tops of the wagons bore strange devices, like that often quoted one, 
"Pike's Peak or Bust." 

The story of a prairie schooner is one of Indian fights, of mutinies, of 
strange dilemmas, of stranger deliverances. It is a story of the sea with the 
water inadvertently left out. 

It is said that if you scratch the Russian you will find the Tartar, and 
beneath the surface of life in the calmest and most conservative communities 
there must be sleeping the old, savage, nomadic instinct. In no other way can 
we account for the strange infatuation that led men to leave their farms, their 
merchandise, to pack their household goods and gods in a house on wheels, to 
cross at a snail's pace one of the most difficult wildernesses on the face of the 
earth. 

We have spoken before of the coaching experiences of our fathers, but 
their adventures were of a mild type compared with those which have enlivened 
main' a journey across the slope of the Rocky Mountains and through the coun- 



TRAVEL IN THE ROCKIES. 



665 



try beyond. We read of the "Sam Wellers " of English turnpike roads, and 
imagine that nothing could exceed the dash and clatter and hurrah with which 
the English coach of a generation ago dashed up to its inn. The narratives of 
such journeys are plain and colorless beside the story of the trip behind a dash- 




Ji IHNNY BUI I , ' OR NO. I. 
{7 lie First Locomot 



ing team with a reckless driver on the edge of a precipice in the wild, wild West. 
Often the choice of dangers seemed small between proceeding and stopping, 
when one appeared to be dropping from the sky down the face of some canon 
wall, with the everlasting snow banked up at the base, a convenient burial-place 



666 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

for any who chanced to topple over. Dropping from heaven it would hardly 
appear to be it one could get a glimpse of the inside of one of those stages and 
realize the character of its occupants. It is said that misery makes strange bed- 
fellows. It is certain that Western stage-coaches have done so. Crowded 
together there, were the prospector, the gambler, the minister, the trader, the 
tender-foot. Those who had all to learn about the new country, and those who 
already knew too much about it for the safety and well-being of others, traveled 
side by side and shared the same adventures and often were obliged to face 
the same foes. Sometimes, as a matter of variety, a land slide or a heavy 
snow storm would completely blockade the whole party, and then the danger of 
freezing and starvation were added to the other pleasant episodes of the trip. 
Sometimes the pastime of hunting, or rather shooting, from the stage afforded 
amusement for the passengers, sometimes hunting of another character afforded 
more satisfaction to the stage robbers who held them up. These stages were 
frequently the prey of the gentry of the road, because it was customary to carry 
mail and express packages containing money and other valuable property by 
this vehicle. 

The proportionate number of those who left America for travel in foreign 
countries was very small in the early part of this century. Even at a time when 
America maintained her preeminence upon the seas the American flag was 
much more intimately known than the American citizen in foreign ports. 

As trade between the United States and Europe increased, the packet ship 
was brought into existence, the first in 1816. The Marshalls, Thompsons, and 
Goodhues, of New York, were the pioneers in supplanting the old merchantman 
by packets. There were a dozen vessels of the old Black-Bail line that ran 
once a month from New York to Liverpool. Soon other vessels of the same 
class were added by other owners, till New York had a weekly service of 
fast vessels, racers in whom the whole nation took pride. It was then 
that the era of ocean travel fairly began. These packets ranged from about 
four hundred to eighteen hundred tons. They were sumptuously fitted out, as 
one of the papers of the day declares ; one of them (and probably others) hav- 
ing a piano on board. The fleet increased. There were Liverpool, London, 
and Havre packets that did an immense trade outside of the passenger service. 
Freights as high as fifty thousand and sixty thousand dollars are recorded for 
single trips. 

The " Isaac Bell," of Fox and Livingstone's Havre lines, made three succes- 
sive voyages across the ocean in eighteen days each, which was thought marvel- 
ouslyfast at the time. The "Saint Andrew," of Rennet's line, sailed from New 
York to Liverpool in fourteen days, a feat which was afterward repeated on 
several occasions. On one occasion the old " Constellation " sprang a leak 
on her homeward voyage. She was crowded with passengers, having seven 



THE AMERICAN CLIPPER SHIP. 



667 



hundred in the steerage, of whom only one hundred and twenty-five were men. 
The labors of these men at the pumps kept her afloat until she got into port. 

The clipper ships began in 1849 to supplant the packets. They were 
built for speed and were the ocean greyhounds of their day. The first of these 
was the "Rainbow," built for the China trade. The largest clipper ever built 
in New York was the " Challenge," which was over twenty thousand tons bur- 
den. The "Comet " made the round trip between New York and California in 
seven months and nine days. The " Sword Fish," on a return voyage from 




ARRIVAL OF THE GREAT EASTERN AT NEW YORK. 



Shanghai, averaged two hundred and forty miles a day or twenty miles an hour, 
which is time that few but the fastest steamers can excel. 

But, while the packets were built for passenger as well as freight service, 
the clippers were intended primarily for freight. But they carried passengers 
also, and come fairly within the limits of a chapter on travel. Their achieve- 
ments were something to be proud of. The whole world, so far as it knew 
aught of nautical matters, knew the American clipper ship. There was no 
question then of the supremacy on the ocean. England tried in vain to com- 
pete, spending her money, employing her best talent, all in vain to produce one 



668 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

vessel that could vie with the racers of which the United States built whole 
fleets. This sounds almost bombastic, but it is a fact that reference to the 
records will prove. An American clipper, on account of superior speed, got 
six pounds a ton for her freight while her English rival was getting four. The 
"Flying Cloud" finally made the fastest record ever made by a sailing vessel 
over the same course, by accomplishing the run between New York and San 
Francisco in eighty-four days. 

THE CANALS. 

Before the advent of the railway, the canals were not only the great 
feeders of commerce, but the highways of travel as well. People who 
would not otherwise have been able to make long journeys discovered the con- 
venience and interest of a trip by the canal. This method of journeying had 
features peculiarly its own. Day after day the boats passed and repassed, the 
mule and his driver plodded along the tow-path, the ears of the travelers were 
regaled with the songs and other language of the driver, who, by the way, was 
as proverbial for his hardness as the mule he drove. And yet there must have 
been exceptions to the general rule, for we must not forget that one of our 
lamented Presidents was said to have made his start in life toward the White 
House along a tow-path. There was much to commend a life on a canal boat. 
The easy motion, the very dilatoriness of the conveyance, had its charm. 
Many character studies must have presented themselves while waiting at the 
locks, or when passengers were crowded in the cabin while a storm swept 
the bosom of "the Raging Canawl." The accommodations were frequently 
like those of some coasting vessel, in which the voyager must take his private 
store-chest and individual bedding, if he wishes to be comfortable. Unlike rail- 
way travel, there was time on a canal boat for making acquaintances and enjoy- 
ing simple social pleasures. 

Of the modern river boat, of the recklessness which characterized travel 
on the Mississippi and other rivers in the early days of steamboating, of the 
races, the explosions, the " Jim Bludsoes " of that day, we have not space to 
tell. It is a day that is happily gone. The river boat now is a floating palace, 
in which we run our sixteen miles an hour in luxury and ease, perhaps hardly 
looking up from our paper from one end of the journey to the other. 

What the next step will be we cannot tell. To-day the air is full of rumors, 
to-morrow it may be full of air-ships, of which the rumors .tell. We live in a 
world of surprises, in which the chief end of man is — not to be surprised. 
Already the beginnings of aerial navigation have been made. Before the ink 
on this page has faded it may be that we shall see 

"The Heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, 
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales." 



CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

MANUFACTURING AND MILLING. 

'fty ""V HE industrial arts of the colonies were those of a new country. 

-£ W^'',< sparsely settled and poor. They had to do with the very 
r^ | ts? elements of living. Among the early comers were craftsmen as 
i«*iflL/ capable as any in their day in Europe, but the work they had to 
do was that of the laborer rather than the skilled mechanic. 
ejfr Their tools were few and their methods rude. They could 
build log houses and serviceable boats. They could dress hides 
and shape the leather into coats, breeches, and shoes. Even the women-folk 
were not unused to leather garments, common enough at that time in the old 
country. Some of the earliest colonists had been chosen for their skill in 
smelting iron, and there were smiths of various sorts. Many were familiar with 
the art of making tar and allied products of the pine ; some could burn brick 
and cut stone, though it was long before such permanent building materials 
were much used. More could make potash from leached ashes, split clap- 
boards, and shave barrel staves. But these arts were pursued mostly at odd 
times, when the more important work of fishing, farming, hunting, or land clear- 
ing was not pressing. 

In that day, even in England, the multitude lived on as low an industrial 
plane as the most benighted country people do to-day. They had few manu- 
factured comforts and no luxuries. The mechanic arts were everywhere manual. 
Their products were manufactures in the old sense — things made by hand. 
Labor-saving machinery did not exist. But the barest beginning had been made 
in harnessing the natural forces and setting them to work. Animal power was 
used only by direct application, in pulling and hauling. The useful horse-power 
was not yet invented, the water-wheel was a novelty, and the steam engine a 
thing of the future — a dreamed-of possibility. 

The colonies had been planted, it will be remembered, not by the colonists, 
nor for them. They were business ventures, planned for the profit of the 
planters, who, for the most part, remained at home. The settlers were to win 
from the soil and the sea, the forest and the mine, such things as the mother 
countries could find use for, and at the same time furnish a market for such 

669 



670 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

things as the Europeans made and wanted to sell ; the carrying trade both 
ways adding another source of profit to the promoters. 

The abundant forests of the new country naturally furnished the first 
material for export — potash for soap and glass, pitch products for naval pur- 
poses, timber for spars, shipbuilding, and other structural uses, coopers' staves, 
clapboards, and the like. The axe and the adze were the primary tools of the 
timber trade ; then came the long saw, employing two men. A great advance 
was made when the saw was hitched to a water-wheel, which was done in 
America fifty years before there was a sawmill in England. The English around 
Massachusetts Bay and the Dutch at the mouth of the Hudson appear to have 
taken this important step about the same time — 1630-33. With their tumbling 
rivers and magnificant forests, New Hampshire and Maine could not help 
taking the lead in the timber trade — the splendid water-powers of the Salmon 
Falls and the Saco being first developed and made the seats of busy industry. 
In Massachusetts and Connecticut, where timber was less abundant, small saw- 
mills were planted wherever water-power was available, but chiefly for 
supplying local needs. The Dutch had a wind-driven sawmill on Governor's 
Island before 1639, and a water-mill on Manhattan Island nearly as early. 
Numerous small streams along the Hudson as far as Albany, broken by falls, 
furnished early mill sites. 

The same is true of the rivers of New Jersey ; and at one time Perth- 
Amboy developed such a promising export trade in lumber that it confidently 
expected to beat New York in the race for commercial supremacy. There were 
mills in the valley of the Delaware before Pennsylvania was founded. Irons for 
a sawmill were brought by Penn's first party, but hand sawing seems to have 
been the rule in Philadelphia for many years. Further south, sawmills made 
slow progress, fire appearing a more expeditious means of clearing land for 
tobacco-planting. During the eighteenth century there was a notable devel- 
opment of the timber trade, especially in Maine, partly for export, but chiefly 
for ship-building and house-making, the thriving fisheries and the rapidly 
increasing population creating a market for much lumber. The timber rafts 
and arks which thronged the Hudson, the Delaware, and, later, the Susquehanna, 
proved the magnitude of the industry, which was something great for the time, 
though insignificant compared with the trade of later years, one group of modern 
mills being able to dispose of more saw-logs than all the colonial mills put 
together. 

As the sawmills widened the area of farm land, and the settlements crept up 
the valleys, the grist-mill became more and more an industrial factor ; and it is to 
the credit of the colonies that they were considerably ahead of the Old Country 
in grinding by water power. The cost of building dams, the risk from floods, 
and the small amount of orrindintr to ^ done for small communities made the 



INFANT INDUSTRIES. 671 

early mills rather public benefactions than inviting business ventures ; and as a 
consequence it was a common thing in all the colonies for towns to offer tracts 
of land and special rights and privileges as a reward for building and main- 
taining mills. In New England the grist-mill was never much more than a 
local convenience. It acquired commercial importance with the growth of 
settlements southward and westward, where an excess of grain was grown. 
New York city had a considerable export trade in flour and ship's bread in the 
latter part of the seventeeth century, when it had a charter monopoly of grinding 
and bolting. For a while New Jersey led in the exportation of wheat, flour, 
and bread ; then Philadelphia, Lancaster, and Wilmington became the important 
milling centres. Generally the grinding and bolting were done in separate 
establishments, and all the processes were rudely primitive, until the art was 
revolutionized by the automatic devices of Oliver Evans in 1787. 

After shelter and bread comes clothing in the list of prime necessities. 
For everything of that nature the early settlers were dependent on the mother 
country, except so far as they saw fit to follow the Indian fashion, and use the 
skins of wild animals. Leather was a common wear by all classes at that time, 
and there were good tanners among the colonists. The supply of imported 
woven goods was small and prices high, and the industrious women-folk were 
prompt in trying to furnish substitutes. 

INFANT INDUSTRIES. 

For a time such domestic industries were encouraged, but as the colon- 
ists increased in numbers their possible trade became an object of interest 
and importance. For them to clothe themselves was to cheat England of at 
least three profits — the clothmaker's, the merchant's, and the shipmaster's — 
and that would never do. Hence, the rule was with this, as with other indus- 
tries competing with those of England, bounties for the production of raw 
materials, if need be ; penalties for their conversion into things of use, or their 
sale, except to England. 

While reporting upon certain small attempts to make serges in Connecti- 
cut and on Long Island in 1705, the Governor of New York, Lord Cornbury, 
gave voice to the English feeling with regard to such doings : "If they begin 
to make serges, they will in time make coarse cloth, and then fine," and that 
would be an injury to the English weavers. "All the colonies, which are but 
twigs belonging to the main tree, ought to be kept entirely dependent upon 
and subservient to England ; and that can never be if they are suffered to 
go on in the notions they have, that, as they are Englishmen, they may set up 
the same manufactures here as people do in England." 

The officers of the Crown, however, could not entirely suppress an industry 
that could be carried on in secret in almost every household, and in spite of 



672 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

prohibitions and more forceful interferences, the making of such stuffs as there 
was material for was persisted in — kerseys, linsey-woolseys, serges, and drug- 
gets for outer clothing, and various grades of hempen cloth and linen for inner 
garments, bedding, and table covers. As the English had not learned to make 
shoes for export, the colonists were permitted to make foot-wear, without inter- 
ference, for their own use and for sale in the West Indies. With hats the 
case was different. The abundant furs of America gave the colonists a decided 
advantage over the English hatters, who protested vigorously. Accordingly, 
Parliament prohibited, under severe penalties, the carriage within the planta- 
tions of "hats or felts, dyed or undyed, finished or unfinished," either for 
intercolonial or export trade. 

Perhaps the best illustration of the struggle for existence by colonial 
industries is seen in the case of iron, and its conversion into things of utility 
and convenience. The industrial age in England was at its dawning when our 
story begins, and there, as everywhere, the door of industrial progress could 
be opened only by an iron key. The few British forges and furnaces were 
despoiling the already scanty woodlands by their demand for fuel, which was 
charcoal, the use of mineral fuel not having yet been learned. In America 
there was no end of wood for charcoal ; that other requisite for primitive iron 
making, water-power, was also abundant ; and, fortunately, iron stone was dis- 
covered as soon as looked for. At Falling Creek, near the Jamestown settle- 
ment, wood, water-power, and iron-stone occurred close together, and there 
the first forge in America was established, about 1620. Two years later the 
Indians suppressed the rising industry, killed the people, and burned the works. 
There was no more iron made in Virginia for nearly a hundred years. 

New England began later, with better luck. A small bloomery was set up 
at Lynn in 1644. and soon after a small furnace — the one making a little bar 
iron "as good as Spanish," the other perhaps a ton a day of iron suitable for 
small castings. Here was cast the first hollow ware made in America. The 
excellent bog ores of Plymouth Colony led to the early establishment of small 
forges, and later furnaces, at Braintree, Taunton, and Bridgewater. Iron from 
rock ore was made at New Haven, Connecticut, in 1658 ; at Shrewsbury, New 
Jersey, in 1675, w here the second blast furnace in America was set up in 1680; 
Pennsylvania entered the list in 171 7, and Maryland a little later, while New 
York lagged until 1 740. By this time forges were becoming numerous in all 
the Northern colonies, but not so much crude iron was coming to England as 
had been anticipated. The thrifty New Englanders preferred to convert their 
iron at home, and had been quite successful in making hollow ware, household 
conveniences, farmers' tools, shipbuilders' and lumbermen's tools — even cannon 
and muskets. As a consequence, Parliament prohibited every sort of iron manu- 
facture except castings, pigs, and bars for export to England, this drastic 



AFTER THE REVOLUTION. 673 

measure being entitled "An Act to encourage the importation of pig and bar 
iron from His Majesty's plantations in America." 

To furnish raw iron and other raw material for British workmen was a 
virtue : to spoil the colonial market for their products was a crime ! The colonists 
did not look at the matter in that way : hence arose those conflicts of interest 
and authority which ended not only in demonstrating the right of American 
manufactures to exist, but the determination of the American people to pursue 
them as they pleased. In seeking industrial freedom the colonies had been 
pressed into a conflict which ended in their political independence ; giving a new 
and striking illustration of Cromwell's remark, that " He goes farthest who, when 
he sets out, knows not clearly where he wants to come to." 

When the war ended the population numbered about four millions, mainly 
of superior stock, and trained by the severe conditions of lite in a new country 
and by war to habits of plain living, patient toil, and thrift. They were free 
men, -not so well informed, so wide awake, or so eager for innovations as their 
descendants became ; still, as a rule, they were ambitious, industrious, handy with 
such tools as they had, inventive, and apt to take advantage of available means 
for increasing the productiveness of labor. There had grown up almost every- 
where a varied and not unskillful manufacture of clothing and other things of 
domestic use and convenience, largely pursued by those who looked to fishing, 
farming, or lumbering for their chief occupation ; and in all the towns and 
villages numerous small shops — the germs of subsequent factories — helped 
materially to swell the volume of mechanical product. 

By their natural development these simple industries, unhindered, would 
in a little while have sufficed for all ordinary needs, making the country indus- 
trially as well as politically independent. But the loosely confederated and 
industrially divided States had no power, if they had not lacked the disposition, 
to defend and sustain each other's industries. Rivalry, not mutual protection 
and helpfulness, was the rule. The trader took precedence of the producer, 
whether farmer or manufacturer, and, eager for immediate gain, he hurried to 
pour upon the exhausted markets of an impoverished country the stores which 
had accumulated in the warehouses of Europe. The country had no gold to 
spare, yet the first year of peace took away over twenty millions ; domestic 
industries, without capital and confronted by a glutted market, were speedily 
paralyzed, labor sought employment in vain, property became valueless, and 
financial distress was universal. 

The first great change in our nation's history — from English colonies to 
independent States — had, as we have seen, grown out of conflicts largely 
industrial in origin. The second change from the original Confederacy to the 
Union under the Constitution was primarily " to meet the imperative need of 
an assured public revenue," in addition to which there was the desire to meet 
43 



6 7 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the industrial needs of the country, while alike in the North and South equally 
there was a call for a National Government having power to protect commerce 
and manufactures from wanton interference and ruinous competition. Without 
that provision in the Constitution, Daniel Webster declared, it could never 
have been adopted. 

The first National tariff act was signed by Washington July 4, 1789, and 
was popularly held as a second declaration of independence. But it is one 
thing to declare, quite another to demonstrate. The spirit which established 
the new Constitution and secured its adoption did not fail to encourage 
the growing infant industries of the country. There was a widely professed 
determination to give preference to products of American labor, and Wash- 
ington was careful to set a good example by wearing conspicuously a suit 
of home-made fabric. In all parts of the country new industries were under- 
taken, and the foundations were laid for many promising manufactures. 
Societies were organized in the principal cities to encourage and promote 
the advancement of the mechanic arts, and associations were formed by 
mechanics and manufacturers for mutual aid and protection. Altogether, it was 
a period of activity, hope, and material progress in manufactures, as was notably 
manifested in the memorable report of Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the 
Treasury, in 1790. 

THE CLOSING YEARS OF THE CENTURY 

saw not a few promising beginnings in the mechanic arts and some notable 
improvements in manufactures long established, particularly in flour, iron, and 
cotton manufacture. Still, a more inviting field lor enterprise and the employ- 
ment of capital was commerce, which showed so manifest a tendency to absorb 
more than its proper share of these great factors of national prosperity, that 
agriculture suffered as well as manufactures. This tendency was seriously 
checked by the Embargo, and almost arrested by the interruption of commercial 
relations with Europe in 1809. Kept at home by these conditions, capital 
turned in part to manufactures, then especially inviting because of the scarcity 
and high cost of imported goods. Domestic manufactures, then chiefly of the 
household sort, were rapidly increased, and factories were multiplied. Fashion, 
too, making a virtue of necessity, threw its influence in favor of domestic fabrics, 
and President Madison, emulating Washington's example, chose American 
broadcloth for his inaugural suit. 

The main idea of the time was to hasten the day when the United States 
should not be at the mercy of Europe, in being dependent upon other nations 
for absolute necessities. In his message Mr. Madison spoke hopefully of the 
rapid extension of useful manufactures, and was pleased with the reflection that 
the indicated " revolution in our pursuits and habits " was in no slight degree 
in consequence of those impolitic and arbitrary edicts by which France and 



INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. 675 

England, in fighting each other, had driven America to rely more and more upon 
home resources. Many State Governors referred to the industrial situation in 
similar terms. "Already," said Governor Irwin, of Georgia, "a spirit of 
patriotism and enterprise has manifested itself generally, and our citizens, fore- 
seeing the evils which must result from too great a reliance upon articles of 
foreign manufacture, shaking off those fashionable fetters which have held them 
in a state of servile dependence upon other nations, are making every exertion 
to clothe themselves in fabrics of their own." Since that time fourscore 
years and more have passed, and the tariff has gone up higher and higher as 
the years have gone by. Whether the limit has yet been reached is a problem 
upon whose consideration we' will not now enter, as being foreign to the 
purpose of this history. 

In textiles — at this time by far the largest manufacturing interest, yielding 
products valued at forty million dollars — there had been signal progress, yet the 
field was not more than half covered. The weaving was mainly done on hand 
looms in families, and it was estimated that two-thirds of the cloth used outside 
the cities was of household production. The next great industry, iron and iron 
manufactures, worth $12,000,000, came nearer to independence ; while the hat 
trade, yielding nearly ten million dollars' worth, only lacked about a quarter of a 
million of making exports balance imports. Table ware was mostly imported, 
but enough of the coarser grades of pottery was produced to supply local needs. 
Little fine glass was made, and of window glass only half the quantity used. 
Most of the printing and writing paper used was of American make ; and 
Connecticut made (from imported sheets) nearly all the tinware required. In 
quantity the more important products were as follows : cloth of all kinds, 
75,000,000 yards, of which twenty million yards of flaxen goods, sixteen million 
yards of cotton goods, and ten million yards of woolen goods were made in 
families. Fifty-four thousand tons of pig iron and nearly half as much bar iron 
proved the prosperity of iron works ; ninety million bricks were made, five 
million square feet of window glass, 1,200,000 bushels of salt, 8000 tons of 
machine cut nails ; 10,000 hogsheads of cane sugar and ten million pounds of 
maple sugar, 1,400,000 pounds of gunpowder, 2500 carriages, and 15,000 
wooden clocks. 

There were three thousand flour and grist mills, twenty-five hundred saw- 
mills, and four thousand tanneries. These figures — phenomenally large for the 
time, both actually and relatively, though small compared with the issues of to- 
day — sufficiently indicate the progress made and making in that early day. 

But we must leave to the general historian the inviting task of tracing 
minutely the actions and reactions of the conflicting forces which have iniluenced 
the progress of the mechanic arts in America — natural resources, social develop- 
ment, freedom of thought and action here, slavery and social restriction there, 



676 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

foreign interference, domestic politics, and the rest. The most that can be 
attempted is to indicate the general trend, and specify some of the more 
significant results. 

Following the hard times of the latter part of the second decade, there was 
an encouraging revival of prosperity, in which the manufacturing interests 
shared. Then came the financial crash of 1837, industrial prostration, and 
general distress, chargeable, in part, to industrial disturbances, but falling with 
undue severity upon manufacturing interests. The fragmentary returns of the 
census of 1840 give no adequate presentation of the development of manufac- 
tures ; yet it is evident from them, and from contemporary reports, that this 
branch of national prosperity, though temporarily embarrassed, had achieved an 
honorable position, mainly through the aid of recent improvements in machinery 
and processes. The population had increased since 1820 from nearly ten 
millions to a little over seventeen millions ; in the meantime, the number engaged 
in manufactures had more than doubled. 

The next decade was in many respects a brilliant one, though the number 
employed in manufactures had increased, according to the census returns, only 
one-fifth, while the population had increased one-third, and the number engaged 
in trade and transportation was multiplied many times. Allowance should be 
made, however, for the fact that the census of 1850 included in its statistics of 
manufactures only those establishments which yielded a product of five hundred 
dollars or over a year. By this time the factory system had largely displaced 
household manufactures, especially in textiles ; while, by the increase of improved 
machinery and a larger employment of steam and water-power, the value of the 
manufactured products increased much more rapidly than the number of 
operatives. The manufacturing establishments which reached and passed the 
five-hundred-dollar limit numbered one hundred and twenty-three thousand, 
with an invested capital of over half a billion dollars and an annual product 
exceeding a billion. Xew York was in the lead, producing nearly a quarter 
of all. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania stood together, and were credited with 
fifteen per cent. each. Connecticut made five per cent.. New Jersey four, 
Maryland and Virginia each two percent., and other States dwindling fractions 
of one per cent, of the total product. The manufacture of flour and meal 
ranked first in value of products, aggregating one hundred and thirty-six million 
dollars' worth. Next came leather and its products, worth ninety-two millions. 
The manufactured cotton goods were worth sixty-six millions ; lumber, fifty- 
nine ; iron and iron manufactures, forty-nine ; woolen goods, forty-eight, and 
ready-made clothing an equal sum. The making of machinery had developed 
into a business worth twenty-eight million dollars ; while the minor manufactures, 
increased threefold since 1840, were producing articles of use, convenience, and 
luxury worth over four hundred million dollars a year. 



NEW FIELDS FOR ENTERPRISE. 677 

Among the causes which had contributed to this burst of prosperity for the 
manufacturing interests were the short crops and civil disturbances in Europe, 
which increased the cost of imported goods, and, by giving an exceptional pros- 
perity to agriculture, greatly increased the local demand for agricultural 
implements and machinery and all other products of domestic manufacture, the 
increased use of mineral coal, the multiplication of steamboats on inland waters, 
and, above all, the marvelous fertility of American inventors, called into especial 
activity by the improved patent system adopted in 1836.' The famine in Ireland 
and increased immigration due to it, the Mexican War, the discovery of gold in 
California and the rush of adventurers thither, were other and not insignificant 
factors of general activity which reacted favorably upon manufactures for 
several years. 

By 1S60 the number of persons employed in manufactures had risen to 
thirteen hundred and eleven thousand, with products exceeding eighteen hun- 
dred million dollars, and there were one hundred and thirty-two lines of manu- 
facture in which the product was one million dollars or more. This was a 
marvelous showing in view of the facts that the country was on the edge of 
an industrial struggle such as the world had never before seen, that it had paid 
in a decade $200,000,000 in gold for imports in excess of exports, and had but 
recently undergone a period of general business disturbance, culminating in the 
panic of 1857. Flour and grist milling remained the leading industry in the line 
of manufactures, with products approaching two hundred and fifty million 
dollars in value. The manufactures of iron and steel yielded two hundred 
million dollars' worth of useful products. Lumber and the various manufactures 
of wood gave a total of one hundred and sixty millions. Leather in its various 
forms footed up over a hundred and eighty millions, about halt being in boots 
and shoes. Clothing manufactures reached and passed the hundred million 
mark ; so did cotton manufactures. Woolens lagged, with a product of sixty 
millions. Silks and linens were struggling for a foothold, unable to accomplish 
much in the face of severe foreign competition. 

The increase in the employment of steam had been rapid, particularly in 
locomotive engines, due to the rapid extension of railways, called for in part, 
in large part producing, a wonderful development of the country west of the 
Alleghanies. Of over two and a half million immigrants during the decade, a 
large part had swarmed upon the new lands opened up in the West by the new 
railways, and, under the lead of two or three millions of wide-awake emigrants 
from the Eastern and Middle States, aided by a new order of agricultural 
implements and machinery, largely invented and manufactured in the West, the 
tier of States north of the Ohio had jumped into sudden industrial prominence, 
in which manufactures soon gained the first position. In i860 more agricul- 
tural implements were being made there than the whole country had produced 



678 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ten years before. There had also been an unparalleled development of other 
manufactures, chiefly based on newly invented articles designed to meet the 
multiplying wants of that most prosperous region ; so that, in a region commonly 
supposed to be suited for agriculture alone, and agriculturally developed with 
a rapidity never before seen, the value of the manufactures soon exceeded the 
total products of the soil. 

Whether regarded as a prime cause or an incidental effect of this won- 
derful industrial revolution, the activity of American inventors must be taken 
account of in any attempt to understand the history of American manufactures. 
The Patent Office was established in 1790, and reorganized in 1S36 under laws 
much more encouraging to inventors. In the first period about 

TEN THOUSAND PATENTS 

for inventions were issued, many of them epoch-marks in the history of mechan- 
ical and social progress. Over seven thousand were issued between 1836 and 
1850, some of them covering devices which have revolutionized society — like 
the electric telegraph and the sewing machine, agricultural machines, the vul- 
canizing of rubber, and others. In the next decade the number of inventions 
patented jumped to twenty-six thousand, a large portion of them resulting in 
the creation of, or in important additions to, lines of manufacture protected by 
patent rights, and thus largely exempt from the stress of foreign competition, 
and able to sustain themselves without much regard to differences in rates of 
wages or in rates of interest charged for capital borrowed to establish them. 

We now come to the period of our Civil War. 

The first effect of the Civil War was to withdraw a large number of men 
from industrial pursuits. Their places in factories and workshops were quickly 
filled, in part by women, more largely by skilled workmen from Europe, high 
wages and steady employment being assured by the scarcity of labor and the 
increased demand for manufactures, especially for army and navy supplies, 
which were called for in vast quantities and rapidly worn out or destroyed. 
These incentives were greatly increased and broadened when the revenue 
needs of the country compelled the adoption of a high tariff on imports, under 
which a multitude of manufactures previously excluded by overwhelming 
foreign competition were enabled to secure an assured footing, the number 
of manufacturing establishments increasing nearly eighty per cent, in ten years. 
In 1 860 the capital invested in manufactures was thirteen per cent, of that 
devoted to agriculture ; in 1870 it had risen to nineteen percent. ; in 1880, to 
twenty-three per cent., and the value of the product, less cost of raw materials, 
was nearly nine-tenths of the country's agricultural products, which had been 
increasing also at a great rate. 

Durinof these two decades, notwithstanding- the losses and burdens entailed 



CAPITAL COMBINES. 679 

by the war, with attendant financial and other troubles, the value of a year's 
manufactures rose from eighteen to titty-six hundred million dollars — a sum 
equal to one-half the aggregate value of all the manufactures of all Europe ; the 
population increasing, in the meantime, from thirty-one to fifty millions. 

A most significant feature of the development of this period was the 
replacing of small establishments by large ones, by natural growth or by consol- 
idation. The value of the product (allowance being made for return to a gold 
basis) was increased more than a half; so was the capital employed and the 
wages paid. The numbers of workers increased about one-third. Thirty-seven 
different industries showed a product of thirty million dollars or over ; twenty- 
one yielded between fifteen and thirty millions ; sixty, between five and fifteen 
millions ; one hundred and eight, between one and five millions ; one hundred 
were under one million dollars. Fully seven-eighths of the manufacturing was 
done in a few large towns in less than one hundred thousand establishments. 
More than half the total product was credited to one hundred cities, whose 
marvelous growth was largely due to this concentration of productive energy. 
The drift of manufactures westward continued a notable feature, especially in 
agricultural implements, lumber products, grist milling, meat packing, and 
distilling. Though New York still led in flour milling, Pennsylvania was the 
great producer of iron and steel. New York made nearly half of all the clothing 
and Massachusetts most of the boots and shoes. New England monopolized 
the manufactures of cotton and shared with the Middle States the principal 
production of other textiles. In household furniture, New York and Massachu- 
setts led, with a marked development toward the West. Ohio and New York 
excelled in the manufacture of carriages and wagons, an industry also strongly 
represented westward. In the production of malt liquors New York was far in 
the lead. Of the three thousand million dollars employed in manufacturing 
the country over, little more than one-tenth was credited to the former Slave 
States, and half of that was used in and around Baltimore. 

Owing to the nature of its raw materials — the finished product of agricul- 
ture — the flour and grain milling industry led in value of products, over five 
hundred million dollars. For a like reason the slaughtering and meat-packing 
industry followed, with over three hundred millions ; leather, $346,000,000 ; 
boots and shoes, $217,000,000; lumber, not including ships and houses, $233,- 
000,000; iron and steel, $297,000,000; cotton goods, $192,000,000; woolen 
goods, $161,000,000; worsteds, $33,000,000; hosiery and knit goods, $29, 000,- 
000 ; mixed textiles, $66,000,000 ; carpets, $32,000,000 ; silks and silk goods, 
$35,000,000; paper, $55,000,000; agricultural implements and machinery, 
$69,000,000; chemical products, $117,000,000; bricks and tiles, $34,000,000 ; 
shipping, $34,000,000; glass, $21,000,000; carriages and wagons, $65,000,000; 
clothing, $241,000,000. 



68o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Not the least significant feature of this magnificent showing of industrial 
progress is the evidence it afiords of the increasing ability of the country to 
supply its needs in staple lines. In the decade covered — 1870-1880 — the 
rate of increase in manufactures, in capital employed, materials used, and in 
value of products, was more than double the rate of increase in population. 
The labor-saving machinery employed was also doubled, and the steam power 
used was nearly tripled. There was also a considerable increase in the employ- 
ment of water power; over 55,400 water wheels, furnishing for manufacturing 
purposes over 1,225,000 horse power. As yet not a half of one per cent, of 
the available water power of the country is utilized. Its development produc- 
tively in place, and at a distance by the electric transmission of power, will, in 
the near future, add incalculable wealth to the American people, already the 
wealthiest in the world ; for the utilization of nature's forces otherwise wasted 
has ever been — save one, the largest source of material gain to humanity, and 
is destined to be an infinitely greater source of benefit. The one source which 
exceeds it in utility, by making it available, is invention. And in this line of 
production — the most valuable of all — the first twenty years of freedom — 1860 
—1880 — yielded ten times as many " new and useful inventions," according to 
the record of the Patent Office, as all the years before i860. 

Since 1880 the progress of the manufacturing industries, now co-equal with 
their development and consolidation, had been such as to make even that of the 
previous decade seem slow. Already the great agricultural States of the West, 
so called, are manufacturing more each year than the entire country did in 
i860; while the South, where manufactures were so long neglected and con- 
temned, is employing as much capital in manufactures as all the States did in 
1850, and is producing nearly as much in value ; and the present prospect of 
the prosperous advancing New South is that it will, in a very few years, win an 
industrial position, judged by the value of manufactured products, if not in their 
diversity, honorably comparable with that of the Northern States. 

In iron and steel, of which alone full returns of the census of 1890 have 
been published, the progress of the last decade places the United States in the 
foremost rank, with Great Britain second. During the census year the produc- 
tion of pig-iron exceeded nine and a half million tons — more than four times 
the product of 1870, and two and a half times that of 1SS0. Pennsylvania stood 
first, as for many years before ; Ohio second ; Alabama third, having risen 
from tenth rank since 1S80 ; Illinois fourth. 

The manufacture of steel has made still more surprising progress, with an 
out-put of nearly four and a half million tons, against one and one-seventh 
millions in 1SS0. The manufacture of steel rails, begun in 1867, and amount- 
ing to less than three-fourths of a -million tons in 1880, had risen to over two 
million tons in 1890, — leading Great Britain's largest product by over 770,000 
tons. 



CHAPTER XXXIX. 



OTTR AMERICAN RAILROADS. 



N view of the important part performed 
by railways in the evolution of American 
prosperity and power, there was some- 
thing specially significant in the name 
of the first American locomotive built 
for the first railway constructed for the 
carriage of passengers and freight by 
steam power exclusively. 

It was the " Best Friend," made at 
the West Point Works, Xew York City, 
in the summer of 1 830, for the pioneer 
-' ' • -' steam railway between Charleston and 

Hamburg, South Carolina, opened for service in the fall of 
that year. There had been railroads at an earlier date, but 
they were not steam roads. The historic three-mile (horse- 
power) railroad of the Ouincy Granite Company, built in 
1827, to facilitate the transportation of stone for the Bunker 
Hill Monument, is a notable example. The Delaware and Hud- 
son Canal Company's gravity coal road between Carbondale and 
Hawley, Pa., was another ; and a later one was the tram-road for horses 
between Baltimore and Kllicott's Mills, now part of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- 
road. And there had been numerous experimental locomotives, by several 
inventors, following the lead of Oliver Evans at the beginning of the century, 
and coming nearest to success, perhaps, in Peter Cooper's little "Tom Thumb." 
This, the first American locomotive to run on rails, was a toy affair, with a three 
and a-half inch cylinder, an upright tubular boiler made with old gun-barrels, and 
a fan-blower for increasing the fire-draft. It was about as big as a flour-barrel 
on a hand-car, and weighed two and a-half tons. In August, 1830, it made the 
run from Baltimore to Ellicott's, twenty-seven miles, in an hour ; but when raced 
against a fast team on the return trip it failed, through the slipping of the belt 
which moved the fan. A year earlier an English engine had been imported by 

681 




682 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, for hauling coal ; and, though sue- 
ceessful in a short run, it proved to be too heavy for the tracks and too tall to 
pass under highway bridges, and was never used. 

The "Best Friend" was more fortunate at first, and it was practically the 
pioneer American locomotive, and the South Carolina road was our pioneer 
steam railway — the first to carry passengers and the United States mail, and, 
withal, the longest railroad in the world when completed. It was not con- 
temptible, either, in the matter of speed. On trial trips (in the latter part of 
1830), the " Best Friend " was able to run at the rate of twenty miles an hour, 
with four or five coaches and forty to fifty passengers ; and from thirty to 
thirty-five miles an hour without cars. Its own weight was five tons. On the 
stockholders' first anniversary, January 15, 1831., an excursion party of two 
hundred and more were carried over the road, in two trips, with a band of 
music and a detachment of United States soldiers with a field piece. 

This was only four months after the formal opening of the Manchester and 
Liverpool road, when Stephenson demonstrated for England the superiority of 
steam railways for passenger travel. 

Stephenson's locomotive, "The Rocket," had two features of the modern 
locomotive which the Best Friend lacked — a tubular boiler and steam draft ; 
and, in June, 1831, the West Point Works sent to the South Carolina road a 
better engine of the " Rocket " type. Soon after the Best Friend's career was 
ended by the excessive zeal of a negro fireman who sat upon the safety valve 
to stop the escape of steam. The fireman's career was ended at the same time. 

Closely pressing the South Carolina road in its claim for priority was the 
Mohawk and Hudson road, from Albany to Schenectady, N. Y., now part of the 
New York Central road. By many it is regarded as furnishing the first fully 
equipped passenger train drawn by a steam-engine to run in regular service in 
America. Trial trips were made in August, 1831, regular service beginning in 
October. The engine was the " De Witt Clinton." the third locomotive built at 
the West Point Works. It weighed three and a half tons, and, hauling half a 
dozen coaches, was able to run from Albany to Schenectady, seventeen miles, in 
less than an hour. An excursion trip made August 9, 183 1, described by one of 
the party, cdves a good idea of primitive railway travel. "The train was made 
up of the De Jlitt Clinton, its tender, and five or six coaches — old stage bodies 
placed on trucks, coupled together by chain links, leaving from two to three 
feet slack. When the locomotive started it took up the slack by jerks, with 
sufficient force to jerk the passsengers, who sat on seats across the tops, out 
from under their hats, and in stopping the cars came together with such force 
as to send the excursionists flying from their seats. 

" Pitch pine was used for fuel, and there being no spark-catcher to the 
smoke-stack, a volume of black smoke, strongly charged with sparks, coal, and 



CRUDE EQUIPMENT. 



683 



cinders, came pouring- back the whole length of the train. Each of the outside 
passengers who had an umbrella, raised it as a protection against the smoke 
and fire. The umbrellas were found to be but a momentary protection, and in 
the first mile the last one went overboard, all having their covers burned oft 
from the frames. 

At the first station a plan was hit upon to stop the jerking. A piece of 
fence rail was placed between each pair of cars, stretching the link-coupling, 
and fastened by means of packing yarn from the cylinders, an improvement not 
fully worked out practically lor many years. 

A more formal exhibition of the possibilities of the road was made a month 




EW TLKMINAL STATION AND MARKET HOUSE OF READING RAILROAD. 
(Erected in 1892.) 



later, when a large number of State and city officials took part. A "powerful 
Stephenson locomotive " had been imported for the occasion, but it did not 
work well, and the DeWitt Clinton was brought into service to haul a train of 
three coaches, while seven other coaches followed, drawn by horses. The 
steam train made the trip in forty-six minutes ; the horse-drawn train in an hour 
and a quarter. Among the toasts offered at the subsequent dinner was this : 
"The Buffalo Railroad — may we soon breakfast in Utica, dine in Rochester, 
and sup with our friends on Lake Erie." 

Now we breakfast in New York, dine on the road while speeding through 
Central New York, and sup as the train flies past. 

Crude as were these early beginnings, they sufficed to convince a wide- 



684 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

awake and enterprising people that the steam railroad was to be the future 
highway, and railway projects were started in all parts of the country, a num- 
ber of them to be carried out speedily. There were nearly a hundred miles of 
railways in operation at the end of 1S31, and the first thousand miles were 
passed in i S 3 5 . In the meantime improvements were introduced in the con- 
struction of tracks, locomotives, and cars, and the characteristics which have 
since distinguished American railroads, rolling stock, and methods of operation, 
began to be developed. 

In Europe the railways were primarily to meet existing needs, social, 
commercial, and military. They connected strategic points, or established 
centres of population, and sought mainly to supply the demonstrated wants of 
ancient trade routes. In America the longer roads were planned chiefly to 
meet future needs. They were pioneers in national development. They pene- 
trated the wilderness to hasten its conquest, to make accessible natural 
resources not otherwise attainable. They created trade routes. Population 
followed the lines they laid down, and their points of intersection became 
centres of production and traffic. Built largely in advance of trade and travel, 
by a people too young to have accumulated an excess of capital, in their con- 
struction and equipment the early American roads showed less of solidity and 
elegance than of originality, one might almost say audacity, in design and 
execution. Curves of startling abruptness were common, and timber viaducts 
of spider-web lightness led over chasms that European engineers would have 
crossed only at a cost which would have thrown a new enterprise into bank- 
ruptcy, as indeed the cheapest construction too often did. 

The unsubstantial nature of the roadway, with wooden viaducts and bridges, 
compelled the use of rolling stock of home production. Almost invariably the 
imported engines proved too heavy and rigid for American service. They were 
built for level grades and wide curves, the axles being held rigidly parallel by 
the engine frames. The second engine of the South Carolina road had its run- 
ning-gear of eight wheels arranged in two trucks, turning on king; bolts, so 
as to easily follow sharp curves. This was improved upon in the first Mohawk 
and Hudson engine, in which the driving wheels were separated from the 
swiveled "bearing" truck, apian which still better enabled the engine to follow 
readily sharp curves and adapt itself to sudden inequalities of the track. In 
1836 two pairs of driving-wheels coupled together were adopted in connection 
with a swiveling bearing-truck ; and thereafter what has since been known the 
world over as the American type of locomotive became the rule here, to be 
accepted ultimately by other countries, — latterly even by the stubbornly conser- 
vative English locomotive builders. 

Closely following the Mohawk and Hudson road, in the same year, came 
the thirteen-mile railway between Richmond and Chesterfield, Va., and a five- 



RAPID RAILROAD EXTENSION. 



685 



mile road from New Orleans to Lake Pontchartrain. The next year Pennsyl- 
vania had a State-built railroad, using horses at first, from Philadelphia to 
Columbia, eighty-two miles, and the Portage road, for canal boats, over the 
mountains from Hollidaysburgh to Johnstown, using stationary engines. These 
roads, with their canal connections, gave Philadelphia a route through to the 
West, reducing the freight charge to Pittsburgh from $100 to $30 per ton. 
New York and Philadelphia were connected by the Camden and Amboy Rail- 
road, finished in 1834. Boston and Worcester were iron-linked in 1835. 




. IN I HE BALI [MORI AM' 



Something of a railway mania ensued, culminating in 1842, in which year 
over seven hundred miles of new roads were built, bringing the aggregate mile- 
age up to four thousand. By this time Boston and Albany had been connected 
by railway, and wheat threshed and milled in Rochester on Monday had been 
delivered in Boston, converted into bread, and solemnly eaten at a public dinner 
on Wednesday. From New York one could go by rail all the way to Wash- 
ington ; and from Fredericksburg, Va., to Wilmington, N. C. In 1850 there 
was no direct rail connection between New York and Boston, nor between New 
York antl Albany. The Hudson River Road was opened in the Fall of 1851. 



686 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

By the consolidation of a dozen previously independent roads, the New York 
Central was created in 1853. With the completion of the Hudson River road, 
the westward traveler could go by rail to Buffalo ; thence by boat through Lake 
Erie to Detroit ; across the State of Michigan by rail ; thence across Lake 
Michigan by boat to Chicago, then almost as far from New York as San Fran- 
cisco now is. Chicago's only railway connection was with Elgin, forty miles 
west. The Michigan Central reached Chicago, giving it direct Eastern connec- 
tion, in 1852. Meantime Western Ohio had reached Chicagoward from Toledo, 
passing through Northern Indiana. Two or three years later Chicago had be- 
come a great railway centre, with lines to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, 
and had entered upon an era of civic development previously unknown even in 
America. During that decade — 1850 to i860 — the development of the region 
between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River was something marvelous, and 
the rapid extension of its railways must be considered as much a cause as 
an effect. 

Coincident with the extension of railway facilities were improvements in 
methods and appliances. The original coaches could carry from four to six 
passengers inside and two at each end outside. The next step was to low and 
narrow cars, with four or five coach-like compartments, into which perhaps 
twenty passengers could be crowded, in groups of four. Then the partitions 
were omitted, making a long box-car with doors at the ends. These cars were 
dimly lighted by tallow candles or whale-oil lamps, which smoked the tops of 
the cars and spattered the sides with grease. The more luxurious of the stiff, 
uncomfortable seats were covered with hair cloth. In winter some of the cars 
were heated by small sheet-iron stoves. There was no ventilation except by 
open windows, into which poured clouds of dust from the unballasted roadbed, 
and denser clouds of smoke and cinders from the locomotive, burning fat pine 
for fuel and belching forth a torrent of sparks that usually enveloped the entire 
train. The cars were without springs. 

The first rails were merely straps of iron nailed to longitudinal sleepers of 
wood. The continuous hammering of the wheels on one side of these bars 
caused them to curl ; the loosened ends would sometimes be struck by the 
wheels and thrust upward through the car, — causing "snake heads," which 
never failed to frighten, and not unfrequently to kill, passengers and derail 
the train. The modern rail, invented by Colonel Stevens, of New Jersey, 
removed this source of danger and commended itself to railway builders the 
world over. The strap rail was not entirely displaced, however, for many years. 

The early railroad stations were mere sheds with few conveniences for pas- 
sengers or baggage. There was no baggage checking, and every passenger 
had to keep track of his own luggage ; a serious bother and constant anxiety, 
as "through" cars were unknown and frequent changes of cars were made 



MODERN FACILITIES. 



necessary by the short length ami independent management of connecting roads. 
At even- terminus the passenger had to get out, buy a new ticket, and see that 
his baggage was properly transferred. At night and in foul weather this was 
no pleasure. Coupon tickets, continuous trains, sleeping cars, baggage check- 
ing over con- 
necting routes, 
and other con- 
veniences came 
in with the later 
fifties. By this 
time the elec- 
tric telegraph 
had become an 
important fac- 
tor in railroad 
management, 
a factor of 
safety as well 
as conveni- 
ence ; and that 
other American 
idea, the ex- 
press service, 
had demonstra- 
ted its advan- 
tages to travel- 
ers as well as to 
shippers of 
goods. 

In 1850 the 
railways of the 
country were 
almost entirely 
confined to the 
Atlantic slope 
north of Vir- 
g i n i a . T e n 

years later the Southern States were crossed in various directions from Rid: 
mond to Savannah and Memphis, from New Orleans to the mouth of the Ohio ; 
and a network of iron roads furnished transportation to the coast for the 
cotton of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. Still greater progress had 




o 5 



6SS THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

been made north of the Ohio. The great Central States were crossed and 
recrossed many times, and their fertile plains were tapped by the four or 
five great chains of connecting lines, furnishing through routes from New York 
to beyond the Mississippi River, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans; 
and Chicago had become a great railway centre. 

During the years of civil war railroad building was largely suspended, to 
begin again with increased vigor with the return of peace. The gigantic task 
of building an iron way across the continent had been accomplished before the 
decade was ended, and the aggregate mileage of the country had been increased 
to about sixty thousand. The example set by the New York Central, and the 
manifest convenience and economy of grouping related roads into united sys- 
tems under common management, had led to the formation of great corporations 
like the Pennsylvania Railway Company and the Baltimore and Ohio, thus 
bringing a confusion of independent roads into orderly and economical action, 
with lower tariff rates for freight and passengers, speedier service, and greater 
efficiency in every department. The great advantages of the rapid and uninter- 
rupted transmission of packages by the express companies led to the extension 
of such service to general freight carrying, and fast freight lines in charge of 
special companies were the beneficent result. 

While these improvements in railway management were developing, not 
less important improvements were making in the construction and equipment 
of the roads. The track was better laid, heavier rails employed, with larger 
cars, and more powerful engines. The Hodge hand-brake, and the Stevens 
brake, introduced about 1850, materially increased the economy and safety of 
handling trains. The Miller coupler and buffer was a more radical improve- 
ment, practically ending the jerking and jolting in starting and stopping trains, 
and lessening the risk of "telescoping " in case of collisions. 

The extension of railway lines and the increase of night travel gave rise 
to the need of better sleeping accommodations, and several roads experimented 
with sleeping-cars about the time of their introduction by Woodruff in 1856. 
Wagner cars were placed on the New York Central in 1858, and soon after the 
Chicago and Alton Road tried a number of day cars altered to sleepers by 
Pullman. Great improvements were developed by Pullman in 1865, the first 
car of the new type — costing the then extravagant sum of $18,000 — was first 
used in the funeral train of President Lincoln. Parlor or drawing-room cars 
were next introduced for day service, adding greatly to the comfort of travel- 
ing. The first hotel car was introduced by the Pullman Company in 1857, and 
the first dining-car, in which all the passengers of a train could take their meals 
as in a well-equipped restaurant, followed in 1868. 

Each decade since 1870 has seen a greater extension of railway lines and 
more numerous improvements in railway material and methods than in all the 



WIDESPREAD RAILWAY EXTENSION. 



689 



years preceding, marvelous as their result had been. In 1S70 the great rail- 
way States were Pennsylvania and Illinois, with nearly five thousand miles of iron 
roads each, while New York, Ohio, and Indiana had a mileage of over three thou- 
sand each. In 
[880 Illinois' 
mileage ap- 
proached eight 
thousand, Penn- 
sylvania's over 
six thousand ; 
New Y o r k , 
Ohio, and Iowa 
had nearly as 
many : and sev- 
en other States 
exceeded three 
thousand miles 
each. Of these, 
Texas had in- 
creased her 
mileage over 
fourfold. Dur- 
ing that year 
the railway 
mileage of the 
whole country 
reached and 
passed a hun- 
dred thousand 
miles ; and over 
seventy thou- 
sand miles of 
new road have 
since been add- 
ed. Illinois re- 
mained in 1890 
the greatest 
railroad State, 

with ten thousand miles ; Kansas had nine thousand ; Iowa, Pennsylvania, and 
Texas nearly as many. After these come Ohio with eight thousand miles ; 
New York with seven thousand seven hundred and sixty miles ; and Michigan 
44 




690 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

with seven thousand three hundred and forty-two miles. Thirteen or fourteen 
States have more than five thousand miles each ; and all except Rhode Island, 
Delaware, Vermont and Nevada have passed the first thousand. 

During the last two decades there have been three great periods of railway 
extension, culminating in 1S71, in 1S82, and in 1887, the advance in the last year 
named being nearly thirteen thousand miles, or as much as the whole country 
had in 1852. The present mileage of the United States — not counting town and 
city roads operated by horses, stationary engines, electric motors, and small 
steam engines, like those of our elevated roads — is more than half the railway 
mileage of the entire world, and more than six times that of any other country. 

At a low estimate something like one-fifth of the entire wealth of the United 
States is represented by these newly created highways of traffic and travel, or 
much more than the sum of the whole world's stock of money, of every kind — 
gold, silver, and paper. Their motive power is furnished by upward of 30,000 
locomotives, valued at half a billion dollars, whose flying trains comprise about 
twelve hundred thousand cars, worth more than a billion and a half. They 
would make a train extending half way around the globe ! Their annual traffic 
earnings exceed a thousand million dollars. They give direct employment to 
an army of 800,000 railway men, and four times as many men are employed in 
subsidiary occupations, in building and equipping them, the railway interests 
supporting fully a twentieth of our entire population. 

To haul on common roads the freight carried by American railroads would 
require not less than sixty million horses, with all the able-bodied men in the 
country to drive them, and the annual freight bill would be increased twenty- 
fold or more by such a return to primitive methods, were such a thing possible. 
Facts and figures like these serve not merely to indicate the magnitude and 
importance of our railway service, but to show how fundamentally necessary it 
is to a civilization like ours. Without such means of cheap and rapid move- 
ment of men and materials the greater part of our populous and wealth-pro- 
ducing territory would have remained a savage wilderness. 

Before the days of railways it cost a hundred dollars to haul a ton of freight 
from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh ; on the easier grades through Central New 
York to Buffalo the charge was twenty-five cents a mile. Only costly commod- 
ities could stand such expensive carriage. The value of a load of wheat would 
have been absorbed in half the distance ; indeed, a distance of a hundred miles 
is generally regarded as the limit of grain transport on common roads. By 
railway it can stand a carriage of two or three thousand miles, the average 
freight charge on all the railroads of the country being about a cent a mile ; on 
many roads it as low as three-fourths of a cent. It was over three cents a mile 
in 1853 and over two cents in i860. Since 1870 the average cost of bringing 
a bushel of wheat from Chicago to New York has fallen from about thirty-five 



THE NEW YORK CENTRAL SYSTEM. 



691 



cents to less than fifteen cents, with corresponding benefit to Eastern and 
European consumers. 

To attempt to trace the causes of this cheapening of transportation for 
freight and passengers would carry us far beyond the limits of space prescribed. 
Some of the chief contributing factors, however, may be briefly noticed — compe- 
tition, due to the multiplication of roads ; more economical management, through 
the development of great systems under united and judicious control ; and, above 
all, improvement in the tracks, engines, cars, stations, and all related means, 
methods, and appliances. As an 
example, when the New York 
Central System comprised the 
consolidation of the Hudson 
River and Harlem Roads, in 
1864, it included 281 miles of 




railway, with double tracks, sidings, and spurs, making a total mileage of 463. 
In 1 89 1 the system included sixteen roads, with over 5000 miles of track. 
Its valuation had increased sixfold, its operating expenses fivefold, and its 
gross earnings more than fivefold. In 1866 it used 125 locomotives, 251 
passenger cars, and 1421 freight cars of all sorts and sizes. The average 
freight car was then twenty-eight feet long and carried ten tons ; the 
average passenger car was forty feet long and would seat forty passengers. 
Now the average freight car is thirty-four feet long, with a capacity of twenty- 



6 9 2 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



two tons ; the passenger coach is fifty-four feet long and carries sixty-four, with 
a comfort undreamed of at the earlier day. The fast express of 1866 attained a 
speed of thirty-four miles an hour. The Empire State Express of 1892 regularly 
maintains a speed of fifty-one miles from the sea to the lakes ; sometimes it 
exceeds a mile a minute. In 1866. the average passenger train, including the 
engine, weighed one hundred and thirty tons ; the average freight train perhaps 
twice as much. In 1891 some of the freight engines alone weighed one hundred 
tons, and a freight train of thirty-five cars, over five hundred tons. A limited 
passenger train would weigh nearly four-fifths as much. In 1891 the system, 
using over eleven hundred locomotives and forty times as many cars, carried 
over twenty million passengers more than six hundred million miles, at a 
cost to passengers of less than two cents a mile, and twenty million tons of 

freight over three thousand million miles. The 
chairman of the Board of Directors of the New 
York Central and Hudson River Railroad Com- 
pany is Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who devotes 
his time to furthering the interests of this great 
company. Mr. Chauncey M. Depew is the active 
president of the road, with Mr. Theodore Voor- 
hies as superintendent, maintaining a vigilant 
oversight of its business, and Mr. George H. 
Daniels is the efficient General Passenger Agent. 
The task of operating this vast enterprise, with its 
five hundred and eighty-six trains daily, devolves 
upon Mr. John M. Toucey, as General Manager, 
whose record may well serve as a .stimulus to 
others — for Mr. Toucey rose from the ranks. 

fohn M. Toucey, General Manager of the 
New York Central & Hudson River R. R., was 
born at Newtown, Conn., July 30th, 1828. After preparing for Trinity College, 
Mr. Toucey, finding that his tastes did not lead him in the direction of the minis- 
try, turned his attention to school teaching, continuing in that profession for two 
years. At the age of nineteen he applied for and obtained a position on the 
Naugatuck R. R., then in course of construction, and was appointed station 
agent at Plymouth (nowThomaston), beginning business there before the station 
was erected. 

About a year after his appointment the station was robbed, and no clue 
obtained until about fifteen hours had elapsed. Mr. Toucey followed the thief 
to Goshen, near Litchfield, where he grappled with him alone, secured the 
money, and turned the man over to the authorities to serve a seven years' 
sentence in the State Prison. While running as conductor between Bridgeport 
and Winstead the road was badly damaged by freshets. Mr. Toucey was given 




JOHN M. TOUCEY. 
■il Manager New York Central Railroad 



THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM. 693 

charge of the reconstruction of the road between Waterbury and Winstead, 
completing the work in a short time to the entire satisfaction of the Company. 
After serving at Indianapolis as agent of the Madison & Indianapolis R. R., and 
later as freight agent on the Morris & Essex R. R., Mr. Toucey entered the 
service of the Hudson River R. R., and in 1855 was appointed passenger con- 
ductor between New York and Troy, subsequently filling the position of agent 
at East Albany. In 1862 President Samuel Sloan, of the Hudson River R. R., 
appointed Mr. Toucey Train Master, from which position he was soon promoted 
to be Assistant Superintendent. 

In 1867 Mr. Toucey resigned from the service of the Hudson River Road 
and accepted the position of General Superintendent of the D. L. & W. R. R., 
under Mr. Sloan, the former President of the Hudson River Road, but after 
two months' service he was recalled to the Hudson River Railroad by Commo- 
dore Vanderbilt, and appointed General Superintendent, with full charge of the 
line then extending from New York to Albany. Some years after the consoli- 
dation of the New York Central Railroad and the Hudson River Railroad Mr. 
Toucey' s jurisdiction was extended to Buffalo, and in February, 1890, he was 
appointed General Manager. Mr. Toucey' s long experience in railway man- 
agement and his habits of close observation, combined with untiring energy and 
native sagacity, have brought him to the front rank among railway managers, 
and he is deservedly popular with the army of men employed on the great 
" New York Central System," where his ability is recognized and his tall form 
is so well known. 

THE PENNSYLVANIA .SYSTEM 

covers between seven and eight thousand miles of track, with a freight traffic of 
one hundred and thirty million tons (over twelve thousand million tons one mile) 
and a passenger traffic of eighty-seven million passengers (over sixteen hun- 
dred thousand one mile), and carries seventy-four thousand names on its pay- 
rolls. The Union Pacific system covers over six thousand miles of connecting 
roads ; the Southern Pacific nearly as many ; the Richmond Terminal system 
something like seven thousand miles ; and in scope of territory and magnitude 
of business these are rivaled, if not surpassed, by several systems reaching 
westward from Chicago into regions that were an almost unbroken wilderness 
twenty-five years ago, now a chain of mighty States, reaching trom Mexico to 
Manitoba, and from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The unprecedented progress 
in the social, industrial, and political development of that wilderness of yester- 
day is primarily due to the people who have converted it to the uses of civiliza- 
tion ; but their presence there was made possible by railways, and the railway 
has everywhere been their great engine of conquest and development — the 
bringer of population and carrier of the wealth they discovered or created. 

To trace adequately the conflicts of systems and the effects of competition 
in decreasing tariff rates, and in improving the means and methods of railway 



694 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

service since 18S0, would require a volume. Much less is it possible to 
describe the notable feats of engineering which have carried railways over 
rivers and chasms, over mountains impassable other than by sure-footed mules, 
across deserts too hot and dry even for mule trains. " No heights seem too 
great to-day, no valleys too deep, no canons too forbidding, no streams too 
wide ; if commerce demands it the engineer will respond and the railways will 
be built." The railway bridges of the country would make a continuous struc- 
ture from New York to San Francisco, and include many of the boldest and 
most original, as well as the longest and highest bridges in the world. The 
pioneer railway suspension bridge at Niagara Falls was as remarkable in its day 
for boldness and originality as for its size and its success. A single span of 
821 feet, supported by four cables, carried the track 245 feet above the river 
that rushed beneath. The cables were supported by masonry towers, whose 
slow disintegration gave occasion for an engineering feat even more notable 
than the original construction of the bridge. The first railroad bridge across 
the Ohio was at Steubenville, completed in 1866 ; the first iron bridge over 
the Upper Mississippi was the Burlington bridge of 1869. The first great 
bridge across the Mississippi was Eads' magnificent structure at St. Louis, whose 
beautiful steel arches of over 500 feet span each give no hint of the difficult 
problems that had to be solved before a permanent bridge was possible at that 
point. It was completed in 1874. Since then the great river has been fre- 
quently bridged for railways, the latest at Memphis, while its great arm, the 
Missouri, has been crossed a dozen times. The Memphis bridge involves the 
cantilever construction, so boldly applied for the first time by the Cincinnati 
Southern Road to its crossing of the deep gorge of the Kentucky River, a 
canon 1200 feet wide and 275 feet deep, with a stream subject to rises of water 
of 55 feet. 

But to return to the subject of railways and their development : the latest and 
most promising phase of this development — the electric railroads — must have a 
paragraph. Though it is scarcely a dozen years since the first experimental 
electric locomotive was exhibited, there are already (June, 1892,) upward of 
five thousand miles of electric roads in operation, capitalized at nearly two hun- 
dred million dollars, Massachusetts leads in mileage, though exceeded by New 
York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio in number of roads. Thirty-six States claim one 
or more roads each, and St. Louis, Mo., boasts of the most complete and exten- 
sive city system. Assurance is given that electric locomotives will soon dis- 
place steam engines from the Elevated Roads of New York city. The largest 
electric locomotives thus far reported are the three eighty-ton electric engines for 
the tunnel service of the Baltimore Belt Railway. They are designed to haul a 
1200-ton freight train fifteen miles an hour, or a 500-ton passenger train thirty 
miles an hour. Similar heavy and powerful electric locomotives have been 
adopted for handling trains at the Northern Pacific Terminals at Chicago. 



CHAPTER XL. 



LIKE ON THE FRONTIER. 



AMONG the unique and interesting figures 
that have entered into the history of 
the West is the squatter. His species 
has become almost extinct. He will 
soon be driven out, ground down, and 
reduced by the leveling arm of civiliza- 
tion to an ordinary American citizen, 
with every trace of picturesqueness lost. 
He may still be seen in the more thickly 
settled regions of the West. His people 
are a mongrel set. They generally 
came from one of the Middle States, a 
family at a time, in an old ox-wagon, 
whose cover was drawn in at the ends- 
like the back of an old-fashioned sun- 
bonnet, and from under whose tattered 
edges a row of pink-faced, white-haired 
children peeped out upon the new 
Canaan of their rightful possessions. 
Inside, wielding his long whip, sat the 
solemn pioneer. Outside, walking be- 
hind a retinue consisting of a cow, a calf, a sad-looking horse, and several 
yellow dogs, came the wind-tanned mother and the eldest, bare-legged boy. 
Over the wheels of the wagon dangled a few rush-bottomed chairs, an old pine 
bedstead, and the simplest household utensils. The father chewed his tobacco 
and cracked his whip, the children chattered, the big boy shied clods of earth 
at the quail and meadow lark, and the mother trudged on in silence. 

When they came to a place that suited them, where there was timber, light, 
sandy soil, and water, they constructed a rude cabin and settled down for a 
season. It did not occur to them to ask whose land it was. They did not want 
to sign deeds, pay taxes, and build fences ; they simply wanted a home where 

695 




:■,■£■*■■..■ 



MOTHKR AND INFANT. 



696 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the father could return after his fishing and hunting and the mother could piece 
her rag-quilts and dip her snuff in peace. They cut a few poles and built a 
rude log cabin, roofed it with brush and sod, and smoothed the earthen floor. 
The old chairs and three-legged bedstead that had been nailed to the wall soon 
gave it a home-like air. A bee-gum spring was sunk, a brushwood fence was 
built for the calf, and a clearing made for the little garden. When they had 
found out the nearest mill their wants were supplied. They had no need for a 
school, a church, a physician, or a preacher. The mother knew of herbs and 
liniments, and as for education, the children needed to learn only to swim and 
climb, to ride and shoot, and, later in life, to shift for themselves. 

Hut often the squatter does not even have a rude cabin to boast of. If he 
has the roving spirit that cannot settle down long enough in any one place to 
make it worth his while to construct a cabin, he will pitch a tent, and he and his 
family will live there in the most aboriginal fashion for a season or two, perhaps, 
before moving on. He may be a trapper, and in that case he gets a fair liveli- 
hood if his luck is good. When the owner decides to claim his land the 
squatter and his family move on. Perhaps the mother will fret a little over her 
ash-hopper, her setting hens, and her turnip patch ; but the children like the 
travel, and the oldest boy is wild to ride the first mustang pony he has broken. 
They have prospered in the West, and this time the cart, followed by the inevit- 
able yellow dogs, is loaded. There are plenty of other spring branches and 
tempting locations. The whole West is before them from which to make a 
more fortunate selection for a home. 

In sharp contradistinction to the squatter is the settler, who knows the 
homestead law, takes up his one hundred and sixty acres, publishes his claim, 
and settles clown to live unbrokenly upon it for the required six months each 
year. When his deeds read right and field notices have been properly witnessed 
and recorded, he is ready to begin life as a citizen and landholder. He hews 
and splits the tough post-oaks and black-jacks, builds strong "worm" fences 
around his possessions, and is ready when the season opens to begin his work. 
1 [e plants his crop, digs his well, sets out the little fruit orchard, drains and 
irrigates, plows and grubs. The scent of the new earth is on his clothing and 
the sweetness and wholesomeness of it are in his heart. If he is progressive, 
public-spirited, and thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the West, he will 
immediately show some indication of his enterprise. He will meet his fellow- 
citizens, boom the lands, work for a new railroad, subscribe for schools and 
churches, and work for better laws. He is bound to succeed. His children 
will be sent away to be educated, and they will have a better inheritance than 
was left to their parents. Probably this independent, self-reliant, and public- 
spirited settler will aspire to political honors. Politics are contagious in the 
West, and nearly every young man looks forward to a seat in the Legislature, if 



PIONEER SE 7 TLERS. 



697 



not in Congress. But whether he represents a county or a district, the thor- 
oughly and typically Western man will always carry with him the opinions that 
have been ground into him by his rough contact with a -hard world. 

There is another 
class of settlers in the 
West who remain 
hopelessly poor in 
spite of sobriety, hard 
work, and good in- 
tentions. They are 
the people whom 
luck seems to turn 
against. Whatever 
he undertakes, this 
settler seems to be 
unfortunate. He 
sells his land to a 
speculator, and the 
unearned increment 
goes into the hands 
of a shrewder person. 
He sees men all 
around him getting 
suddenly rich, and in 
time he gets used to 
seeing others profit 
by his toil. His wife 
must always be an 
overworked creature, 
for it takes the united 
toil of both to get a 
living. It is a wonder 
that these pioneer 
women of the West 
do not mon- tn 

quently lose courage. I^KH -. - ; ~T.'- .--- -.-. _-• 

But in times of grass- * tumble from i-ke trail. 

hoppers or severe 

drought, of destruction of crops by wind or hail, she never gives up. She has the 
temperament that can endure. The woman who has always known hardship 
and toil, who marched in behind wagons, her face burned and hardened by 




69S THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

exposure to wind and sun in varying seasons, is not the person to become faint- 
hearted. Hard-featured but tender-hearted, brown-skinned but white-souled, 
she holds her own with her sturdy husband and plodding sons. She takes upon 
her shoulders the helpmeet's half of a pioneer life. She is up with the dawn, 
milks her dozen cows, carries her water for cooking and washing purposes from 
the nearest branch, a quarter of a mile away, cuts her own wood, and makes her 
own fires. Uncomplaining and unresentful, she sings at her work, and is always 
ready to cheer and comfort. Side by side with the men, she plows and hoes the 
new fields, or, mounted on her own broncho, participates in the round-up or 
" stands herd " while the boys take their noontide nap in the chapparal bush. She 
teaches her children to ride, swim, and to look out for themselves at a tender age. 

Childhood as it is known in cities and in older States, with its prattling 
ignorance and pretty dependencies, is almost extinguished in the far West. 
The boys assume responsibilities beyond their years, and the girls soon learn 
to share the mother's household cares. The substantial facts and practical 
experiences with which the life of their elders is guided has an early influence 
upon their own. They learn the time of day by the sun, and predict changes 
of weather by the hazes and rings about the moon. They learn the ages and 
distinctive qualities in the herds. The hills are their schools, pebbles and wild 
flowers their books, and the horses their playmates. They become sophisticated 
with a rare impersonal knowledge of nature and things created. 

The cattle business, as the practical ranchman calls his vocation, has under- 
gone a decided change during the past twenty years. The wholesale and 
loosely-managed business of the '6o's has given way to the statistical and close- 
margined system of the present. It has grown, with the tendency of modern 
practical and domestic economy, toward a basis of real valuations. It is the 
scope and territory of the business that have been so reduced, while the results 
remain practically the same. The last census bulletin, reporting on live stock 
on ranges, gives a summary of 517,12s head of horses, 5433 mules, 14,109 
asses or burros, 6,828,182 head of cattle, 6,676,902 sheep, and 17,276 swine. 
The sales of horses amounted to $1,418,205 ; cattle, $17,913,712 ; sheep, 
$2,669,663, and swine, $27,132. The total number of men in charge of the 
ranches was 15,390. As to territory for stock-raising, nature has made a gen- 
erous provision. The immense Panhandle of Texas, which, with its fertility of 
soil and abundance of rainfall, must not be confounded with the arid Pecos 
regions or the Llano Estacaclo, or Staked Plains, embraces hundreds of square 
miles of juicy grass-range. Even the Staked Plains, considered useless for 
years, are gradually being converted into good pasture regions by means of 
irrigation and artificial forestry. The prairies of Kansas and the rolling 
stretches of the Indian Territory are used for no other purpose than as the 



CATTLE RANGES AND COWBOYS. 699 

Until the passage of the Oklahoma Bill the Indian country was an 
Eldorado for Kansas and Texas cattlemen. The withdrawal of the country 
was a great backset to the cattle business in the Southwest. The Texas 
mesquite grass is superb winter forage, keeping its nutritive and sustaining 
qualities long after it appears dried up and juiceless, but it is not as fattening 
as the Territory grass. Every winter the Oklahoma district was overrun with 
herds driven from the surrounding country, and while in the Territory among 
the helpless Indians the cattleman resorted to his primitive system of commis- 
sion. He knew he had no right to the Indian's land, and the Indian knew it 
too, but, so long as he was not inconvenienced for the time being, he made no 
resistance to the usurpation of his land. The stockmen pacified the Indians for 
the use of their pasturing grounds by supplying some of their more immediate 
wants, giving them fresh beef and cows and a generous amount of tobacco, 
whisky, and worthless trinkets for the squaws. 

The pleasant little game of reciprocity was broken up by the President's 
fiat forbidding foreign stockmen to drive their herds into the Territory. There 
was no penalty attached, and there was, naturally, considerable manoeuvring on 
the part of the stockmen to evade the law and its inconvenient requirements. 
The United States troops stationed at Forts Sill and Reno were commissioned 
to enforce the law and to order all foreign stockmen then in the Territory to 
vacate immediately. One stubborn old-timer from Texas, who was peacefully 
teaching his herd to eat forbidden grass, came under the official eye and gave 
no small amount of trouble. After numerous attempts at resistance, he finally 
rounded up his herd and marched to the border ; but, as there was no fiat to 
forbid his return, deliberately marched back. Several official orders were sent 
him ; each time he obeyed, and each time he returned. Finally two companies 
of cavalry were sent out to insist upon the enforcement of the law. The 
mounted cavalry, in their brave uniforms, riding their stall-fed and stiff-kneed 
horses, did not find the matter as simple as they perhaps had anticipated. They 
set out, solemnly marching in fours, before, behind, or in the midst, wherever 
they could keep their places in the disorganized herd of long-horns. The drive 
occurred in April, when most of the cows were calving, and the young calves, 
unable to keep up in the line of march, fell behind. The infuriated mothers 
continually broke ranks to rush back after their wailing offspring. The cap- 
tain's roaring command, " Charge the brute!" would be countermanded by the 
order, "Retreat! Retreat!" when a maddened animal bore down upon the 
solemn fours. This weary war between the staid soldiers and the resisting 
herd of cattle went on for two clays and nights. A combination of forces more 
incongruous can scarcely be imagined. The calm, rimless stretch of prairie 
was the scene of battle between man and beast. The dignified soldiers, in their 
unwonted service, contrasted with the infuriated mob of cattle ; the flashino- of 



7QO 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



arms and the prancing of terrified army horses : the confusion of orders : the 
lowing of the cows, bellowing of steers, and cries of deserted calves : the little 
knot of cowboys and their leader riding submissively apart, watching the pro- 
ceedings with amused 
interest, wondering 
what the result would 
be. 

The troops were 
called upon a number 
of times during the 
season to preserve 
the majesty of the 
law before the 
country was finally 
deserted by the stock- 
men. The Territories 
and new States of 
the Northwest still 
supply unlimited 
range and pasturage. 
The plains extending 
from the Black Hills 
and the mountain 
3 of Wyoming, 
from Fort Collins to 
the Montana border, 
and between Pike's 
Peak and Denver, as 
well as the greater 
part of the mild- 
wintered New Mexi- 
co Territory, are rich 
in grasses and well 
watered lands yet 
open to the stock 
raiser. 

The Colorado 
plains are particularly adapted to sheep raising, which is one of the leading 
industries of that State. The range is cut up by mountains and canons into 
small ranches, where sheep can be raised to better advantage than cattle. 
The business is more hazardous than cattle raising, but it has competed 




IMPROVED METHODS. 701 

successfully with it. There has long been a feudal rivalry between the two 
classes of ranchmen. 

Until 1876 the Texas cattlemen had a monopoly of the business. They 
dealt entirely in common stock cattle, or stock-horns, that required no provision 
further than that afforded by a mild climate, sufficient grass, and water. The 
business was carried on with primitive simplicity. The herders, who were hired 
for twelve or fifteen dollars a month, furnished their own outfits, and a few pack- 
mules were sufficient to carry all necessary camp supplies. Even prices were 
established by the ranchmen to suit themselves, for competition was not strong 
enough to regulate them. When the Texas range became insufficient, and the 
stockmen drove their herds to the northwest, to Nebraska, Wyoming, and 
Colorado, a rivalry sprang up and a new impetus was given to the industry. 
In the year 1891 the Swan Land and Cattle Company pastured no less than 
80,000 head of cattle in eastern Wyoming, and smaller companies owned from 
14,000 to 50,000 stock and horses. A depression in the stock business was 
aggravated by the mixing of native and foreign breeds, and the spreading of 
various contagious and infectious diseases. Beef that had sold for $25 per head 
depreciated to $10 and 512. Stock cattle remained more nearly stationary in 
price, but there was a rapid falling off in numbers, due to both the rage of 
epidemic, and the general neglect of the business. When things were at their 
worst for both stock and stockmen, syndicates from the North and from foreign 
countries gave the trade a new boom. Capital was plentiful for a while ; 
ranches and ranges were bought or leased in great numbers, and prices were 
pushed up by conventions and unions to something near their original fictitious 
bases. This state of affairs did not last long, and there was a gradual falling in 
prices to actual values. " Corn-fed " and refrigerated beef held its own, and 
people soon learned that 1000 head of cattle sheltered, fed, watered, and 
judicially disposed of paid better in the long run than 100,000 running wild on 
insufficient ranges, starving, famishing, and dying of " pink-eye " and epizooty. 
Ranches were cut up into farms and orchards ; the herds were reduced in num- 
bers and made to supply the same demand as existed in the times of such 
unwieldy conditions. 

The introduction of fine-blooded short-horned breeds into the Northwestern 
and Southwestern ranges has not proven profitable. The summers are too long, 
the winters too severe, and the country itself unsuited to the successful raising 
of cattle that require the best forage and shelter, as well as careful handling. 
The cattle and sheep that thrive in the West must be able to obtain their own 
subsistence all the year round, and to live without shelter, except that provided 
by nature in the ravines and wind-breaks. During the summer and winter 
they roam at will over the plains, frequently wandering long distances from the 
home range. At the fall and spring round-ups, when the stragglers are hunted 



;o2 -THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

up, an enumeration made, calves branded and beeves selected for market, the 
cattle are brought together from points a hundred miles or more apart. The 
different ranchmen pick out their own cattle, recognizable by the brand, which 
is recorded like the deed of property. It is interesting to study the effect of 
climatic and physical conditions of the country upon the cattle running wild. 
Even the proportion of the young is regulated by the characteristics of the 
country. Each member of a herd seems to know its place, and always prefers 
its own to any other herd. These dumb creatures have more intelligence than 
is usually credited to them. 

The so-called wild cattle of Texas bear a close resemblance in many ways 
to the deer. The large development of horn, the pointed nose, the lustrous eye, 
and above all, the thinness of Hank and length of leg, together with the fleet- 
ness, are the main characteristics. The spring "round up," which is held in May 
and early June, is the busiest time of the year. A captain is chosen from each 
district, and the stockmen and cattle boys belonging to fifteen or twenty ranges 
in each work under him. The work is apportioned, and the helpers are under 
semi-military organization. Each cowboy has eight or ten horses, and the 
whole district, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles, is laid out in daily 
rides. A month or more time is generally required to cover the country. It 
is said that the cowboys track cattle as the Indian tracks his game. The water- 
courses must be followed, and the country carefully searched for stragglers, 
some of which sometimes turn up after several years' absence. The boys are 
up at four or five o clock in the morning, and frequently are in the saddle six- 
tern or seventeen hours a day. While the work is hard, the boys look forward 
to it for months. It is preferable to the monotonous life at the ranch, with no 
diversion but euchre or poker, or an occasional novel. The cowboy must have 
a constitution of iron to endure the hardships of prairie life. He is obliged to 
work, when after cattle, in all weathers. He must stand severe heat and 
drenching rains, with no prospect of relief from duty until after the work of the 
" round up " is finished. He must know the business of a ranchman thoroughly, 
and understand every detail of the work, whether that of day-watcher, herder, 
or night-watchman, or that of captain of a district. He must be a good horse- 
man, know how to break a wild pony, and to ride it when broken, must be keen- 
witted, and never lose presence of mind, or he may lose his life in a stampede. 
Furthermore he must be a skillful lariat thrower. He cannot hope to handle 
his hempen rifle with any degree of skill until he has had at least two years of 
practice, and it will be much longer than that before he can throw it with 
anything like a sure aim. 

The lariat is generally made of native grass, braided and twisted. It is 
forty-five feet long, and from three-eighths to one and a half inches in thickness. 
The end is wound with waxed shoemakers' thread and the whole boiled in oil to 



THE MODERN COWBOY. 



703 



give it strength and pliability. The loop is often made of leather which lias 
been soaked, stretched and scraped, and "seasoned." The success in handling 
the lariat depends entirely upon the strength and movement of the wrist. 

The cowboy has been called the King of the Cattle Country. It may be 
only to a limited extent that he is monarch of all he surveys, but in his happy 
careless way he dominates even the master of the ranch. In former times he 
was only the son and grandson of a cowboy, and was relegated to a distinct 
class in the social scale. He inherited even the bow-legs of his pony straddling 
ancestors, and all the physical characteristics which the occupation stamped 




A DISPU IL OVER A BRAND. 



upon them. It was almost literally true of him that "he was born in the sad- 
dle." To-day the cowboy is sometimes the son of a well-to-do family in an 
eastern or middle State, and is led by a spirit of adventure to experience some- 
thing of life in the West. The dash of the winds, the roar and swell and free- 
dom of the prairies, delight him. Colleges seem small and limited, books and 
papers tame and unvarying. The prairies exhilarate and depress him by turns. 
He becomes contemplative and introspective, taciturn and uncommunicative, 
by reason of his surroundings. He is to be seen standing about the station 
at train time, in some western town, or more likely sitting sideways on his high- 



704 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

pommeled Mexican saddle, watching the people that crowd off or on the cars 
with much the same expression that shows in his pony's eyes — an expression 
that can be best described by lack of alertness. 

In dress he has escaped from every restraint of conventionality. He hates 
a coat, wears a coarse shirt of blue, gray, or red twilled flannel, as loose as a 
blouse, confined at the waist by a leather belt. His sombrero may be decora- 
ted with a gold or silver band, and tassels dangling at the side. His trousers 
fit his muscular legs with unfashionable snugness, and his hair is several seasons 
too long. His swearing is only a provincial sin, and his dram drinking a com- 
panionable custom. He is quick to join a lynching party, a band of serenaders 
en route to a ranch where an Eastern girl is visiting, a posse after a horse-thief, 
or an old folks' band to a camp-meeting, entering upon each with impartial 
enthusiasm. He sits his horse like an Arab, and handles his lariat as a profes- 
sional trickster his cards. That unwieldy-looking coil of grass rope tied to his 
saddle-skirts is as dangerous a weapon as one could wish for. It has taken 
long practice to wield it dexterously, and the cowboy takes a natural pride in 
his accomplishment. If a steer or buffalo straying from its herd crosses his 
path, out springs his lasso in rhythmical sweeps over the rider's head, then off to 
one side, falling in a sure slip-knot over the animal's head, or around the fore 
legs, and by a twirl of the rope and a sudden movement of the wrist the victim 
is thrown upon the soft turf. In all feats of esquestrianism the cowboy excels 
the Indian ; apparently as reckless, but more judicious and unerring in his 
movements. Even the cow-pony, the faithful friend of the cowboy, has a divin- 
ation that is almost human. He enjoys the chase as a dog the hunt, the cow- 
boy's " Halloo-oo-oo ! " being to him what the hunter'^ horn is to the hound. 
He understands every movement of his rider. When the master coils the 
lasso about his head, the pony slows up ; when the rope coils into nooses 
ahead of him, he advances ; as the noose slips over the animal's head or 
leg, he halts, jerking back his head, stiffening his neck, and planting his fore- 
feet into the ground, aiding the lariat thrower in landing the victim. It is 
peculiar that the pony never becomes tame. He submits to the girth and bit 
unwillingly, and each time he is turned loose upon the range imagines his 
apprenticeship to control is over. When he is captured again he shies and 
balks, flashes his eyes, chews the bit, and resents the whip. It is only' an 
illustration of nature's refutation of man's superiority. 

The pony, too, comes from the range ; his progenitors were the wild horses 
of the West ; his education is practical and experimental. His endurance 
is something marvelous. He can outrun two ordinary horses, and endure 
hunger and thirst with an indifference almost equal to that of the horned frog. 
He comes near his abstemious cousin, the burro, as regards provender. His 
intelligence is phenomenal, and the understanding between him and his master 



RANCHING LEGALLY CONTROLLED. 



705 



is fraternal. When the rider wishes to start on a gallop, he raises his elbows, 
giving them a slight shake, and he is borne away. A touch of the hand on the 
neck will bring the horse to a sudden standstill, without the use of the rein. It 
is no wonder that the two have become inseparably associated, and the horse is 
named "Friend" or "Little Brother." In his lonely ride the cowboy sings his 
strange ballads with all the devotion and fervor of an Oriental lover. 

There are some branches of industry that are retarded, if not destroyed, 
by civilization. One of these is ranching, as it was followed in the wide scope 
pasturage and free grass of a quarter of a century ago. Then no man thought 
of claiming more land than he needed or cared to fence for his own homestead 
purposes. As free as the air he breathed, or the blue sky over him, was the 
land that lay before him. In a primitive and fraternal fashion the early stock- 
men availed themselves of the privileges of 
commission. In a land, where range and 
booty alike were free, the first man out in 
the spring caught the first calf, and the tiny 
bit of communistic property belonged to 
the man who branded it. There was a 
premium on the early bird, and the pros- 
perous stockman who believed that all was 
fair in love and war and cattle raising might 
at times hear the epithet: "That man? 
Why, he'd steal yearlings ! " applied to 
himself. He reasoned that a crime con- 
fessed is not a crime, and a bad deed done 
in the light of clay is not bad. Even the 
round-ups were a sort of barbarous Derby- 
day or hurdle-race, where stakes were open 
and entry was free, and where no hard 

feeling existed. The big-hearted and free-handed pioneer might forgive this 
wholesale thievery, but the law did not, which came with the homesteader 
and syndicates and barbed wire fences. Signs appeared on the pasture gates 
warning trespassers against appropriation of private land, wagon roads were 
forced to turn out of their way, railroads came into the Territories, and the free 
citizen was restrained by monopolies. With improved methods of cross feeding 
and ensilage, with winter sheds and artificial lakes, drouth and famine were 
circumvented, and stock raising settled down into a safer and smaller business. 

In old times a ranchman was content with his dozen "hands," each one 
furnishing his own two ponies, and riding away the season at fifteen dollars a 
month. The ranchman was content, also, to live in his log cabin, or even " dug- 
out," while he could count his herds by the thousands. His manner of business 
45 




AN INDIAN WARRIOR. 



706 THE STORY OE AMERICA. 

was primitive and economical. His pack-mules carried all necessary camping 
and cooking utensils. Nowadays he must have fifty, instead of a dozen "hands." 
He must mount each one, allowing several good horses to each, besides fur- 
nishing a big round-up wagon with its stove and gasoline and coal-oil, and 
supplies of canned fruits, meats, and delicacies of all kinds. He builds fine 
houses, wind-mills, patent gates, and commodious barns, and lives not only in 
comfort, but in luxury. The old fashioned "round-up " on the southern ranch 
was a merry time for all, from the children on the ranches to the horses, who 
enjoyed the race immensely. Ponies were driven from the range and "broke" 
to the dominion of girth and bridle ; gray blankets were sunned, rolled up with 
a suit of flannel underwear, and strapped on to the back of the patient pack- 
horse ; saddle-bags and grip-sacks were brought forth and filled, one side with 
cold biscuits, corn dodgers, sugar, and coffee, and the other side with streaked 
bacon, salt, pepper, and raw onions. Over the gray bundles on the pack-horse's 
back dangled frying-pans, tin cups, an iron pot, and a home-made cedar bucket. 
The cowboys, booted, spurred, and sombreroed, wearing buckskin gauntlets 
and leather belt holding pistol, bowie knife, shot and powder horns, and a 
canteen of whisky, are off to the round-up. The old ranch is left almost 
deserted for a few weeks until the herds are brought back. The roaring and low- 
ing of the approaching cattle can be heard for miles. The tramping of thousands 
of restless hoofs and the bleating of thousands of thirsty tongues announce the 
approach of the cattle, and all work or play is stopped until after the herds come 
in. The cowboys chant a weird halloo-oo-oo ! as they canter on their ponies 
amid the bellowing, hooting animals. Such a little thing may cause a stampede ; 
the sudden whirl of an obstreperous pony, the dropping of a red handkerchief, 
the low flight of a hawk or turkey-buzzard, and off go the cattle and .pandemo- 
nium reigns. In vain the boys surround the herd, chanting their persuasive 
" Halloo-oo-oo ! " which is unheeded by the frightened animals. They break 
ranks and scatter, pawing up the hot sand or loose grass, and flinging it, hoof- 
load after hoof-load, over their backs. Bellowing, lowing, and bleating, they 
rush back to their wild haunts on the range. Thus the entire work of a round- 
up may be lost in a few hours. But if the herd is once within the stockpens, all 
is safe. The cattle are separated, yearlings numbered, calves branded, and the 
old cattle turned loose upon the range. 

One of the most remarkable yet common scenes about a ranch is a cattle 
funeral. Let a beef be killed, no matter how far away from the general range, 
nor how deeply the spilled blood be covered up, its kindred seem instinctively 
to know of the slaughter, and resent it with all the force of their dumb natures. 
They will come running for miles, tongue out, eyes red, back bristling, to find 
and keep watch over the murdered mate. They keep up the most mournful 
lowing, and as the crowds become thicker, the weird, resounding echoes of the 



THE WOMEN OF THE RAXCH. 707 

plain are terrifying to one unused to such scenes. Those who come first seem 
to agree upon a kind of solemn courtesy to the new comers. They move back 
and the new relay rushes in in an orderly circle. They lower their horns and 
paw up the earth, bawling dismally, till a new committee arrives, and they 
in turn move back to allow the new comers to continue the tragic ceremonies. 
And woe to any human being who arrives upon the scene ! With instinctive 
resentment, the brutes recognize their bloody-handed master, and plunge a1 
him to rend him to pieces in their frenzy. Sometimes this awful death watch 
is kept up for twenty-four hours. It makes one nervous and apprehensive. 
It is as if Nature rose in her might, declaring, " Thou shalt not kill ! " 
Ranchmen, of course, get accustomed to this weird spectacle, but when they 
cannot endure the maddened mob of upbraiding dumb creatures about their 
door, the yearlings for beef are driven several miles away to be killed, and 
hauled back to the ranch proper. 

No sketch oi the West is complete without some allusion to the far-famed 
woman of the ranch. 

The cattle queen, who has held a conspicuous place in the narrator's tale of 
the West for a quarter of a century, belongs to the old days of typical ranch life, 
the merry round-ups, barbecues, log-raisings, and sheep shearings. At her best 
she was a much gilded and idealized creature. In fiction, she was daring and 
fearless, wore buckskin leggings, a black-plumed sombrero, high-heeled boots, 
and gold-spiked spurs. She swore lightly, with a pretty flirt of her skirt, car- 
ried her brace of Colt's revolvers, counted her thousand cattle on her thousand 
hills, rode into town and shipped them, depositing her good paper in the 
Stockmen's Bank. In life, the ranch woman was a hard-faced, hard-worked 
female cattleman, who trusted to others and was swindled out of her rights, 
who drove into town four times a year in her piano-box buggy and paid her 
lawyer half she made. She did not often, however, manage the business for 
herself. If she was the widow of a cattle king, she lived in her large; town 
house, made occasional visits to the ranch, and reaped the profits left by her 
swindling superintendents. 




CATHEDRAL SPIRES IN THE HARDEN OF THE GODS. 




THE MAIN BUILDING OF THE CENTENNIAI hXPOSITION. 



CHAPTER XLI. 




WORLDS FAIRS. 

HE artist who would most strikingly portray, in two contrasting 
scenes, the difference between the civilization of classic days 
and that of the present, could perhaps select no better subjects 
than a Roman triumph and an American world's fair. On the one 
canvas would be depicted the characteristic glories of an age of 
ruthless violence — the files of captives, the stores of treasure 
wrested from the vanquished, and all the tokens of conquest and 
of oppression, of the victory of the strong over the weak. On the other canvas 
would be shown the equally characteristic glories of an age of peaceful pro- 
gress— the triumphs of art and industry, the achievements of inventive skill, the 
products of beneficent labor, brought together by many powers, the strong and 
the weak together with equal right, to enlarge the borders of human knowl- 
edge, to increase the friendly intercourse of nation with nation, and to 
strengthen the ties of fraternal fellowship that now bind all the world. With 
the former of these scenes, a thing unknown in our later times, we do not here 
propose to deal. To the latter, which was equally unknown in those earlier 
ages, we shall devote some cursory attention. 

The first World's Fair must bear a date within the recollection of a large 
proportion of men now living. But national fairs had long hitherto existed, 
doubtless doing much to prepare the way and to develop plans for the universal 
exhibitions. France, conspicuous in this generation for international displays, 
was the leader in national fairs ; and it was in the troublous times of her first 
republic that her earliest attempt in that direction was made. In the year 1797, 

711 



712 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

under the patronage of the Government, an exhibition was to be made in the 
Chateau of St. Cloud, of various arts and industries, chiefly those of the State 
workshops, the Sevres china, the Savonnerie carpets, the Gobelins tapestries. 
The Marquis d'Averze was the immediate organizer and manager of the enter- 
prise, and his object was to revive the industrial interests of France, to open the 
long-closed factories and warehouses, and to give employment to the long idle 
workingmen. He arranged a comprehensive and noble display ; but on the 
very day when it was to be opened political proscription drove him, with the rest 
of the nobility, into exile. His idea was not thus to be ignominiously aban- 
doned, however. The next year he returned, and another exhibition was 
organized and held at the Maison d'Orsay. Such was its success, and so good 
its effect upon the industries of France, that the Government took up the work, 
and held a series of such fairs in 1S01, 1802, 1806, 1819, 1823, 1834, 1839, 
1844, and 1849. The Spanish Government followed the example, and held 
national exhibitions in 1S27, 1828, 1831, 1841, and 1845. Bavaria and Belgium 
did likewise in 1848, 1849, ar >d 1850; and England held several, at Leeds, Bir- 
mingham, and Manchester, between 184a and 1850. All these were merely 
national fairs. But now the time was ripe for a more pretentious and compre- 
hensive undertaking. 

The credit of conceiving, elaborating, and conducting successfully the first 
'World's Fair must be ascribed to Prince Albert, the Consort of Queen Vic- 
toria of Great Britain and Ireland. That wise and progressive man had 
earnestly devoted himself to the public service of the nation he had come to live 
among, and had interested himself much in the various local fairs, especially 
that held at Birmingham. In 1849 he suggested to the Society of Arts the 
scheme, already well matured in his own mind, of an international exhibition. 
The project was greeted with enthusiasm, and soon the whole English people, 
from the Queen to the humblest working-folk, were heartily committed t5 it and 
were laboring for its successful execution. The ideas that inspired Prince Albert 
may well be taken as the initial keynote of all the brilliant and imposing inter- 
national fairs that have since been held in many lands, and so, as he himself 
expressed them, are worth repeating here. Speaking at a grand banquet given 
by the Lord Mayor of London, he said : — 

" I conceive it to be the duty of every educated person to watch closely 
and study the time in which he lives, and, as far as in him lies, to add his humble 
mite of individual exertion to further the accomplishment of what he believes 
Providence to have ordained. Nobody, however, who has paid any attention to 
the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are 
living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accom- 
plish that great end — to which, indeed, all history points — the realization of the 
unity of mankind ; not a unity which breaks down the limits and levels the 



THE FIRST UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION. 



713 



peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth, but rather a unity 
the result and product of these very national varieties and antagonistic quali- 
ties. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe 
are gradually vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and 
we can traverse them with incredible speed ; the languages of all nations are 
known, anil their acquirement placed within the reach of everybody ; thought 
is communicated with the rapidity and even by the power of lightning. On the 
other hand, the great principle of the division of labor, which may be called the 
moving power of civilization, is being extended to all branches of science, 
industry, and art. Whilst formerly the greatest mental energies strove at 
universal knowledge, and that knowledge was confined to few, now they are 




directed to specialties, and in these again 
even to the minutest points. More- 
over, the knowledge now acquired becomes the property of the community at 
Large. Whilst formerly discovery was wrapt in secrecy, it results, from the pub- 
licity of the present day, that no sooner is a discovery or invention made, than 
it is already improved upon and surpassed by competing efforts. The products 
of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have to devise 
which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production 
are contrasted to the stimulus of competition and capital. Thus man is 
approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which 
he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after the image of 
God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs His 
creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer nature 



7H 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



to his use — himself a divine instrument. Science discovers these laws of power, 
motion, and transformation ; industry applies them to the raw matter which the 
earth yields us in abundance, but which becomes valuable only by knowledge ; 
art teaches us the immutable laws of beauty and symmetry, and gives to our 
productions forms in accordance with them. The Exhibition of 1S51 is to give 
us a true text and a living picture of the point of development at which the 
whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point, from 
which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions. I confidently 
hope the first impression which the view of this vast collection will produce on 
the spectator will be that of deep thankfulness to the Almighty for the bless- 
ings which He has bestowed upon us already here below ; and the second, the 
conviction that they can only be realized in proportion to the help which we are 
prepared to render to each other ; therefore, only by peace, love, and ready 

assistance, not only 
between individuals, 
but between the na- 
tions of the earth." 

To give to this 
first World's Fair a 
truly international 
character, an invita- 
tion was issued to all 
the architects of the 
world to prepare 
competitive designs. 
No less than 233 
were offered, 38 
coming from foreign 
lands. The one prepared by Mr. — afterward Sir — Joseph Paxton was finally 
accepted, and a building erected on its lines in Hyde Park. This well-named 
Crystal Palace was made chiefly of iron and glass, and cost nearly a million 
dollars. It was 1851 feet long — in token of the year of its opening, 1851 — and 
450 feet broad, and contained 900,000 square feet of glass, 3300 iron columns, 
2225 girders, and nearly a million square feet of flooring. The entire edifice was 
completed within four months, by the labor of ten thousand men, and the exhi- 
bition was formally opened by the Queen on May 1, 185 1. There were 13,937 
exhibitors, from nearly all important countries in the world. The United States 
made 499 exhibits, ami secured, proportionately, more prizes than any other 
nation. Among articles of American manufacture that attracted much attention 
were coaches and carriages of all kinds, piano-fortes, cotton and woolen cloths, 
india-rubber goods, reaping machines, liie-boats, and engineers' tools. The 




NEW YORK CRYSTAL PALACE OF 1853. 



715 



famous statue of The Greek Slave, by Hiram Powers, was also exhibited, to the 
wondering admiration of all critics. It may be added that the exhibition was a 
financial success, the receipts exceeding all expenses by more than $700,000; 
and that during the six months of its continuance fully $20,000,000 was added 
to the ordinary income of the city of London. 

The success of the London World's Fair inspired other nations to make 
similar ventures, and the roll of universal exhibitions, more or less worthy of the 
name, that have been held since 185 1, in Lurope, America, Asia, Africa, and 
Australia, is a long one. We have in this present essay to concern ourselves, 
however, only with those held in the United States. Two have already 
been held, and, at the very moment when these lines are being written, 
preparations for the third and incomparably greatest are proceeding with an 
energy worthy of the American people. And as these shows present a striking 
contrast, as already 
noted, to the military 
pageants of old 
Rome, so do the 
three, in succession, 
reveal impressively 
the marvelous growth 
of this nation, and 
also of other lands, 
in all those useful 
arts that make for 
the betterment of life 
and for the upraising 
of the human race. 

So meagre were 
the means of intercommunication between America and England in 1851 that 
less than 5000 persons from this country visited the World's Lair in London. 
All who did, however, were profoundly impressed, and many of them were 
made eagerly desirous of opening such an exhibition in New York. These 
desires took practical shape before the end of the year; and an Association for 
the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was formed in New York. By 
unanimous consent that city, as the chief commercial centre of the country, was 
chosen as the proper place for holding such a fair. It was to lie a private enter- 
prise. But the city. State, and National authorities gladly gave it countenance 
and aid. The city of New York granted, on January 3, 1 S 5 2 , a lease for five 
years of Reservoir Square as a site for the building. This square, at Sixth Avenue 
and Fortieth to Forty-second Streets, is now known as Bryant Park. The only 
conditions exacted were that the building should be made chiefly of iron and 








;i6 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

glass, and that the entrance fee should not exceed fifty cents. The State of New 
York, on March n, 1852, formally chartered the Association. The National 
Government agreed to admit foreign goods for exhibition free of duty, and used 
the services of its Ministers and Consuls to interest other nations in the under- 
taking. Stock amounting to $500,000 was issued, and the first $200,000 of it 
was taken by about a hundred and fifty firms and individuals. 

The architects of the world were, as in London, invited to send in plans. 
Among the many received was one from Sir Joseph Paxton, which greatly com- 
mended itself to all who saw it, but which had to be rejected because its form 
was not suited to the grounds. The plan finally accepted was the work of 
Messrs. Carstensen and Gildemeister, and it combined beauty and utility in a 
notable degree. The Reservoir Square measured 445 by 455 feet in area. 
The building, therefore, had to conform to those dimensions. Its general plan 
was that of a Greek cross, the length of each diameter being 365 feet 5 inches, 
and the width of each arm 149 feet 5 inches. The intervals between the arms 
were filled up with triangular "annexes," one story high, making the outline of 
the ground plan octagonal. The principal part of the building was two stories 
high, the second story being a gallery extending all around the side walls within. 
The framework of the building consisted of 190 cast-iron columns on the ground 
floor and 14S on the gallery floor, connected with and supporting an elaborate 
system of girders and trusses. The roof, resting on iron arches and girders, 
was of wood, sheathed with tin, and the side walls were of iron panels filled in 
with panes of translucent glass. At each of the eight corners was an octagonal 
tower, 76 feet high. Over the centre rose a splendid dome, 100 feet in 
diameter and 123 feet high. It was by far the largest — indeed, the only 
important — dome ever built, at that time, in the United States, and was looked 
upon, by Americans who had never seen St. Peter's or the Pantheon, as one of 
the wonders of the world. 

There were used in the building 300 tons of wrought iron and 1500 tons 
of cast iron ; 15,000 panes, or 55,000 square feet, of glass ; and 750,000 feet of 
lumber, board measure. The height from the ground floor to the gallery floor 
was 24 feet, and to the ridge of the nave, 67 feet 4 inches. The total floor area, 
including the gallery, was 249,692 square feet, or 5^ acres. The population of 
New York city at that time was about 525,000, and of the United States, 
25,000,000. These figures may with interest be compared with like statistics of 
the second and third universal exhibitions in America and of the Nation at their 
dates. 

The Crystal Palace was formally "inaugurated" on July 14, 1853, the 
President of the United States and many other dignitaries being in attendance, 
and the next day it was opened to the general public. Of its subsequent his- 
tory it is only needful here to acid that the World's Fair was not financially 



OBJECTS OF INTEREST IN THOSE DAYS. 



717 



profitable ; that after it was ended the building was used for various exhibition 
purposes, especially by the American Institute for its annual fairs ; and that 
finally, in October, 1858, it was totally destroyed by fire. 

Of the exhibits made, which came from most of the important countries, and 
which were divided into 31 classes, no detailed mention can here be made. It 
may be recalled, however, that here were seen the Whitney cotton-gin ; Thor- 
waldsen's famous group of statuary of Christ and His Apostles ; the first ( >hio 
wines ; the Whitworth measuring machine ; Cary's rotary pump ; Saxton's deep- 
sea thermometer ; the first successful type-founding machine ; fire-engines of 
the old hand-pump pattern ; a revolving repeating rifle, and the primitive types 
of revolving pistols ; the then novel process of electrotyping ; printing presses 
such as small country newspaper offices now use, but then used only by the 
great metropolitan dailies ; the famous Francis life-boat ; the original Morse 
telegraph, which had 
been patented fifteen 
years before ; the 
Fresnel light -house 
lens ; and " T h e 
Greek Slave" and 
other statuary by Hi- 
ram Powers. Such 
were the wonders of 
art and industry at 
that time. The tele- 
graph alone stood for 
the wonderful de- 
velopment of electri- 
cal science which we 

now enjoy. Photography and its multitudinous applications to pictorial art 
were not hinted at. And while in glass and porcelain and metal there were 
many objects never since surpassed, they came, most of them, from abroad. 
America had not yet learned that she could make them. Yet on the whole 
it was a display most highly creditable ; as worthy of the time, perhaps, if we 
consider all the circumstances that attended it, chiefly to hamper it, as was the 
Centennial Exhibition of its time, or as will be the Columbian Exhibition of 
the august year in which it is to be given to the world. 

Events more momentous than a world's fair engaged the attention of the 
country soon after the burning of the Crystal Palace, and when the time of 
restored peace seemed opportune for another such exhibition the United States 
was almost a new nation. Between 1853 and 1876 there occurred changes 
of the most radical nature and of the most imposing proportions, in politics, in 




■■-*n. 




7 i8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



society, in commerce, in industry, and the growth of the nation in material 
things was enormous. When, therefore, it was decided that the one hundredth 
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence should be marked by holding a 
second universal exhibition, it was evident that the enterprise would .completely 
dwarf its predecessor. It would do this if it were larger only as the nation 
itself was larger. But knowledge and invention had outstripped even the 
swift growth of population and the settlement of new lands, so that the number 
of interesting products to be shown was proportionately much larger than 
before. Moreover, trade relations and facilities for intercourse with other lands 
had also been vastly developed, so that it was certain there would be a much 
more extended and varied representation from abroad. To meet these changed 
conditions, preparations were made on a most generous scale, with a view to 
outstripping even the great fairs held in London in 1862, in Paris in 1867, and 

in Vienna in 1873. 
The city of Phila- 
_j£. delphia, in which the 

Declaration of Inde- 
pendence was adop- 
ted, was fittingly 
chosen as the scene 
of this magnificent 
undertaking. That 
municipality granted 
the free use of 450 
acres of land in Fair- 
mount Park, and 
under a charter gran- 
ted by the National 
Government a Commission, composed of two members from each State and 
Territory, and a Board of Finance were formed, and the work was formally 
begun. It is impossible within the limits of this chapter to describe in detail 
the exhibition grounds, or even to mention all the two hundred buildings 
erected thereon. The Main Building was the largest edifice in the world. 
It was 1876 feet long — in token of the year 1876 — and 464 feet wide, and 
covered an area of 21^ acres. The ridge of the roof was 70 feet above 
the floor. Spacious galleries extended all around the interior. Nearly one- 
third of the floor space was occupied by American exhibits, and the re- 
mainder was divided between the various foreign nations, including the 
British Empire and its colonies, France and its colonies, Germany, Austria, 
Russia, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark, Switzerland, 
Holland, Belgium, Turkey, China, Japan, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, 




THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION OF 1876. 



719 



YK 



Chili, the Argentine Republic, Egypt, Tunis, the Orange River Free State, and 
the Sandwich Islands. The frame of the building was of iron, filled in with 
wood and glass. Of similar construction was Machinery Hall, 1402 by 360 feet 
in size. Agricultural Hall covered 117,760 square feet. Memorial Hall was ot 
permanent construction, covering 76,650 square feet, and was used for an art 
gallery. Horticultural Hall, also permanent, was 350 feet long by 160 feet 
broad. The Women's Department Building was 208 feet square. The United 
States Government had a large building ; many foreign powers had buildings 
of their own, as did many of the States ; there were large buildings devoted to 
special industries, and not a few private exhibitors had structures scattered 
about the beautiful grounds. The total number of exhibitors was 30,864, this 
country furnishing 8175. 

The exhibition was opened with imposing ceremonies, in which the Presi- 
dent of the United 
States took a leading 
part, on May 10,1876, 
and remained open, 
excepting on Sun- 
days, until Novem- 
ber 10th following. 
The number of visit- 
ors in that time was 
9,910.966, who paid 
ail mission fees ag- 
gregating $3,813,- 
724.49. The largest 
number on any one 
day was 274,919. 

The educational value of the exhibition to these hosts of visitors was, of 
course, incalculable. Here were the wonders of the world, natural and arti- 
ficial, gathered together in such variety and profusion as never before, from 
every clime, from every studio, from every workshop, all systematically arranged 
and displayed, so as to be seen most readily and studied most advantageously. 
There were to be seen nearly all the applications of steam power to the useful 
arts, and nearly every steam-manufacturing process known to the world to-day. 
The advance of chemistry and the wonders of photography were shown ; the 
perfected printing-press ; the great Krupp guns and other implements of war ; 
indeed, a thousand and one things, great and small, that were undreamed of 
in the days of the old Crystal Palace. There were even some hintings at 
the marvelous development of electrical science which later years have seen, 
at the telephone and the electric light. And the people of America were- 




r-o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

made acquainted, as never before, with the arts and sciences and industries 
of foreign lands, some far surpassing their own, some lagging far behind, 
and some so different from them as to appear like the products of another 
world. Equally were the multitudinous products of America a revelation to 
the many visitors from abroad ; and it may well be believed that this exhibi- 
tion did incomparably more than any event which had then occurred to 
extend human knowledge of the world, and to join harmoniously together 
the intellectual, social, industrial, and commercial interests of all the peoples 
of the globe. 

But the greatest significance of this exhibition, perhaps, lay in the event 
which it commemorated and in the circumstances that surrounded it. A hun- 
dred years of national independence had been completed. The most impor- 
tant experiment of all the ages in civil freedom and popular government had 
been tried, and, by the arduous judgment of a century of practice, had been 
found amply successful. The nation had been subjected to the severest possi- 
ble tests, of foreign war, of domestic strife, of social upheavals, of all that could 
strain to the utmost the framework of the civil fabric, and it had triumphantly 
endured them all. More ; it had grown in size, in wealth, in power, in learning, 
in all the elements of abiding greatness — the twenty-five millions of the first fair 
being forty millions at the second, with more than a commensurate progress in 
all the ways of civilization — until the nation was now the pride of humanity and 
the wonder of the world. To mark the fullness of these achievements, the 
greatest of all international fairs yet held was an appropriate undertaking. 

Like the fabled bird of Rumor, however, the nation gains strength by going 
on. If the progress from 1853 to 1876 was marvelous, more marvelous still is 
that displayed in the years from 1876 to 1892 — or to 1893, if we may look a 
little distance into the future. The forty millions are now more than sixty-three, 
perhaps, sixty-five, millions ; new States have entered the circle of the Union, and 
industry and commerce, and resultant wealth, have grown until statistics seem a 
dazzling romance. Since it was made the site of the Crystal Palace of 1853, 
New York has more than trebled in size ; while what was in 1853 an insignificant 
Western town has now grown to more than twice the dimensions that New York 
itself then boasted, and is properly made the scene of America's third universal 
exhibition. And inasmuch as the United States of to-day surpasses the United 
States of 1853 and of 1876, insomuch, and more, will this Columbian Exhibi- 
tion, held nominally to mark the fourth centenary of the discovery of America, 
surpass the fairs held in those years. F"or it not only has the added great- 
ness of the nation to build upon : it has also the example and the lessons of the 
splendid series of like enterprises seen in the four quarters of the globe since 
the middle of this century; especially those in London in 1851, in Dublin and 
in New York in 1853, in Paris in 1S55, in London in 1S62, in Paris in 1867, in 



THE COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION OF iSpj. 



Vienna in 1873, in Philadelphia in 1S76, in Paris in 1878, in Sydney in 1870, in 
Melbourne in 1880, and in Paris in 1889. Every idea of practical utility that 
was developed at these will exert its beneficent influence at Chicago, and be 
joined with all the invention and enterprise of the most energetic city in the 
land to make it, as it should be, the greatest fair the world has ever seen. 

It would be superfluous here to dwell upon the history of Chicago, whose 
marvelous growth almost rivals that of Aladdin's fabled palace ; or upon the 
present size and splendor of that Western metropolis. When it was popularly 
decided to hold an international exhibition on the fourth centenary of Columbus's 
great discovery, a general sentiment indicated Chicago as the place for it. 
Other cities put forward rival claims, it is true ; notably New York, Washington, 
and St. Louis. And each of these presented strong reasons for its choice. But 
the final selection of Chicago was foreseen from the outset, and at the end was 
acquiesced in by the 
other cities and by 
the whole country, 
with much enthusi- 
asm. 

The Columbian 
exhibition was organ- 
ized, under the laws 
of the State of Illinois, 
on August 15, 1889. 
The name of the cor- 
poration was "The 
World's Exposition 
of 1892," its capital 
stock was $5,000,000, 

and its duration was to be ninety-nine years 
scribed for by March 23, 1890 ; and on April 2 
act of Congress creating the World's Columbian Commission, and giving to 
the enterprise the official sanction of the National Government. Then the city 
of Chicago entered upon the work of preparing grounds and erecting buildings 
with characteristic energy. 

The exhibition has a dual site, consisting of Jackson and Washington Parks, 
and the Midway Plaisance, which connects them. Jackson Park, which has long 
been one of the city's favorite resorts, lies in the southern part of Chicago, on 
the shore of Lake Michigan. A little to the northwest, and entirely inland, is 
Washington Park, and connecting the two is Midway Plaisance, a splendid 
parkway, 600 feet wide. The grounds set apart for the exhibition comprise 586 
acres in Jackson Park, 371 acres in Washington Park, and 80 acres in Midway 




All the capital stock was sub 
1890, the President signed the 



72: 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Plaisance, a total of 1037 acres. Upon these, previous to their selection for 
the purposes of the fair, more than $4,000,000 had been spent in improvements 
and beautification, and the exhibition managers have spent, or will spend, at 
least $1,000,000 more. No world's fair site, not even that in Philadelphia in 
1876, ever equaled this in size and beauty. 

Brief mention must be made of the principal buildings, which in size com- 
pletely dwarf the most ambitious efforts ever made before in all the world, and 
which are at the date of this writing so well advanced that we may properly 
speak of them in the present tense. The chief structure is that devoted to 
Manufactures and Liberal Arts. It measures 1 687 by 787 feet, thus covering nearly 
thirty-one acres, and the vast galleries within increase the floor space to nearly 
forty acres. The ridge of the great glass and iron roof is 1 50 feet above the 
ground. Machinery Hall is 850 by 500 feet, and has a gallery fifty feet wide 

all around its interior 
wall. The vast de- 
velopment of electri- 
cal science has made 
necessary a building 
specially devoted to 
its display, and the 
structure here pro- 
vided is 700 feet long 
and 345 feet wide. 
The Agricultural 
Building, as befits the 
greatest farming na- 
tion in the world, is 
spacious and impos- 
ing, being 800 by 500 feet, its centre crowned with a huge glass dome, 
1 30 feet high. To fisheries is given a building 11 00 feet long and 200 feet 
wide, containing a series of aquaria with 140,000 gallons ot water. The 
mining industry is housed in a palace 700 by 350 feet, and forestry in a 
unique structure 500 by 200 feet, which deserves some slight description 
here, for its novelty. On all four sides of the building is a veranda, 
supporting the roof of which is a colonnade consisting of a series of columns 
composed of three tree trunks each twenty-five feet in length, one of them 
from sixteen to twenty inches in diameter and the others smaller. All of 
these trunks are left in their natural state, with bark undisturbed. They 
are contributed by the different States and Territories of the Union and by 
foreign countries, each furnishing specimens of its most characteristic trees. 
The sides of the building are constructed of slabs with the bark removed. The 




THE COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION OF i8 93 . 723 

window frames are treated in the same rustic manner, as is the rest of the 
building. The main entrances are elaborately finished in different kinds of 
wood, the material and workmanship being contributed by several prominent 
lumber associations. The roof is thatched with tan and other barks. The 
visitor can make no mistake as to the kinds of tree trunks which form the 
colonnade, for he will see upon each a tablet upon which is inscribed the common 
and scientific name, the State or country from which the trunk was contributed, 
and other pertinent information, such as the approximate quantity of such timber 
in the region whence it came. Horticulture has a splendid building 1000 feet 
long and 250 wide, the centre crowned with a glass dome 187 feet in diameter and 
1 1 3 feet high, under which tall palms and other trees may be seen. The Dairy 
Building measures 200 by 95 feet, and is two stories high. The Art Palace, a 
structure of classic design, is 500 by 320 feet in size. In this exhibition the 
women of the world are participating as never before, as is natural in an age 
when woman's ability in all useful achievements is recognized more fully than 
ever. Accordingly, one of the finest buildings on the grounds, designed by a 
woman architect, is devoted to their interests. It is 400 by 200 feet in extent, 
and two stories high. Unique among the exhibits is that made by the United 
States Naval Department. It is a full-sized model of one of the new battleships, 
erected on piling on the lake front in the northeast portion of Jackson Park. 
It is surrounded by water and has the appearance of being moored to a wharf. 
The structure has all the fittings that belong to the actual ship, such as guns, 
turrets, torpedo tubes, torpedo nets and booms, with boats, anchors, chain 
cables, davits, awnings, deck fittings, etc., together with all appliances for 
working the same. Officers, seamen, mechanics, and marines are detailed by the 
Navy Department during the Exposition, and the discipline and mode of life on 
our naval vessels are completely shown. The dimensions of the structure are 
those of the actual battleship, to wit : length, 348 feet ; width amidships, 69 feet 
3 inches ; and from the water line to the top of the main deck, 1 2 feet. The 
battery comprises four 13-inch breech-loading rifle cannon ; eight 8-inch breech- 
loading rifle cannon ; four 6-inch breech-loading rifle cannon ; twenty 6-pounder 
rapid-firing guns ; six 1 -pound rapid-firing guns ; two Gatling guns, and six 
torpedo tubes or torpedo guns. All of these are placed and mounted respec- 
tively as in the genuine battleship. Beside this the National Government has a 
fine building, 420 by 350 feet, in which the exhibits of the various Departments 
are to be seen. The various industries relating to Transportation are housed 
in a building 960 by 250 feet in size, with a huge one-story annex covering nine 
acres more. The administrative offices of the exhibition are housed in an 
imposing structure 260 feet square, crowned with a dome 220 feet in height. 
The Illinois State Building is 450 by 160 feet, of splendid appearance and of 



724 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

permanent construction. Besides these, there are numerous other edifices, built 
by the various States, by foreign countries, and by individual exhibitors. 

The limits of this chapter will not permit even a general description of the 
exhibits displayed in these wonderful buildings. It is conceded that the Colum- 
bian Exposition not only surpasses all its predecessors in the size and architec- 
tural beauty of its buildings and landscape-gardening, but also in the number 
and character of the exhibits. 

The popular interest manifested in the attendance of this great Exposition 
has been all that could reasonably be expected, though at first there was a feeling 
of disappointment on the part of the Managers that the attendance was not larger. 
The Eair was formally opened by President Cleveland on the ist of May in the 
presence of a most imposing assembly of people. The Fair itself, however, 
was not in complete readiness until about a month later. During the early 
months the attendance varied from about 75,000 to 150,000 per day. During 
the month of September the admissions were 4,658,902. The high-water mark 
was reached on Chicago Day, October 9th, with an attendance of over 700,000. 
Other notable days for large attendance were July 4th, 283,273; Illinois Day, 
243,951. The greatest day for attendance at the Paris Exposition was 397,150, 
and at the Centennial, Pennsylvania Day, 217,526. Chicago deserves the 
greatest possible praise for having conducted this great Exposition to success. 
For a long time there was anxiety as to the financial outcome, but on Chicago 
Day the last of the debt, originally amounting to $4,500,000, was paid off. 

It still remains true that the greatest feature of the Exhibition is the archi- 
tecture and the landscape-gardening, — including in these all their sculptured and 
painted decorations and adjuncts. In these the deepest pleasure and the deepest 
instruction are to be found, as well as the largest and longest benefit to the country. 

The visitor who could only be a single day at the Fair, or a single night, 
found it worth any sacrifice to enjoy this alone. And if it happened to be a 
question between the daytime or the illumination at night, he was hardly the 
loser by the latter ; for surely no eyes now opened on this world are likely ever 
again to behold any sight so nobly beautiful. 

At first there was a general feeling that the earlier visitors at the Fair, and 
especially the artists who had to do with it, had allowed their imaginations to 
run away with them in the accounts which they gave of its beauty and its com- 
prehensiveness ; but as the months have passed by, the impression has steadily 
deepened that the Columbian World's Fair is far more significant than any of 
its predecessors ; that it is the realization of certain ideals of architecture and 
arrangement which have long been in the minds of men, but which have not 
before been realized, and that it marks the beginning of a new era in the art 
history of this country. It is a matter of supreme satisfaction that this vision 
of loveliness materialized under the hand of the greatest republic. 



CHAPTER XLII. 

THE METROPOLITAN CITY. 

4 . O city has ever adhered more devotedly to the purposes of its 

--** founders than has money-making and money-spending New 

y.'-sritf." York. Its distinctive charm — for with all its ugliness it has a 



*» m 



charm — and its characteristic virtues and vices are all trace- 
able to the unchangeableness, the clearness, and the decisive- 



ness of its master-passion, trade. The trading settlement of 



the seventeenth century was a commercial capital, in the 
small ; the commercial capital of to-day is simply a trading settlement, in the 
large. The history can be summed up in the one word expansion. When, in 
1609, that shrewd Dutch navigator, Captain Heinrich Hudson, entered New 
York Harbor on his clumsy brig, the " Half Moon," he was attracted to the 
spot, not by the beauty of Manhattan Island's undulating and wooded scenery, 
not by the picturesque clusters of Indian wigwams along the banks of its rivers, 
lakes, and streams, but by its business advantages, by the fertility of its soil, by 
the abundance of its fur-bearing animals, and, above all, by the commodious- 
ness and convenience of its river and harbor. His native country, the United 
Netherlands, was then one of the great commercial nations of the globe. No 
sooner had he returned home, therefore, than his mercantile countrymen were 
roused to at least a temporary interest in the financial possibilities of the new 
discovery, and within a year barter of Holland gewgaws for Indian furs had 
begun. Finally, in 1622 merchant vessels entered the harbor to take formal 
possession of the place in behalf of the West India Company, — a trading cor- 
poration which had acquired charter rights over it, and were authorized to make 
out of it all the money they could. This they proceeded to do, though in rather 
bungling fashion, and they attempted nothing else. Thus, since the day the 
city was established to this, the accumulation of wealth has been the motive 
which has shaped its destinies and moulded its character. The following year 
the ship " New Netherland " brought into the harbor thirty families, prepared to 
establish a permanent trading colony, and soon after all Indian rights to the 
island were purchased at a cost of less than twenty-five dollars. So began New 
York, then called New Amsterdam. 

725 



726 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

For over half a century this outlying settlement had little to say about its 
own affairs. It was governed paternally by the West India Company. The 
busy merchants of Amsterdam would pick up what man they could as agent, — 
the best which could be obtained for the unenviable place was not good — would 
give him all but unlimited powers and send him out to further their interests and 
incidentally to protect the inhabitants over the sea. Occasionally and grudgingly 
they would spare a little time to give him a few directions which might prove 
practicable, but often proved otherwise, or, vexed by his importunity, might send 
him a little money for gun, powder, and ball. In the main, however, he was 
left to his own devices and resources — distracted on the one hand by the urgent 
demands from his employers for greater profits, and by his subjects for greater 
outlay. The duties of governor were none the less onerous and perplexing, 
that only a petty colony was at stake. The New Englanders were constantly 
encroaching on one boundary ; the Swedes on the other. The Indians were 
often treacherous and vindictive. From these dangers, colonies as far distant as 
Albany and New York had to be protected. The ammunition was often scanty, 
a scattered population soon sprang up, making the problem more difficult, and 
the fortification was hopelessly inadequate. To be sent out on such an agency 
•was little less than banishment. The colony was out of the world, was small, 
and did not prove as lucrative as was hoped for. There was hardly an enter- 
prise of the West India Company which did not outrank it. Except in special 
exigencies, only men of second-rate abilities could be spared to it. One gov- 
ernor was put in charge, apparently for no better reason than that his character 
was under too much suspicion for him to be trusted with anything more valu- 
able. He verified the suspicion. Most of the governors were conscientious, 
however ; some of them were wise, but all of them were arbitrary. 

A change of foreign masters made little difference in the internal affairs of 
the colony. In 1664, the British treacherously seized New Amsterdam and 
changed its name to New York, without a shot being fired in its defence. In 
1673 the Dutch recaptured it. In 1674 it was surrendered again to the British 
as not worth quarreling over. The settlers, on their part, treated the change 
of masters with the same indifference. Their government, though arbitrary, had 
been so light as to be almost unfelt. It had kept them ignorant of the art of 
self-government, but it had taught them what was much better, individual self- 
help. To this day the New Yorkers display the same ignorance and the same 
knowledge, for there are few cities which present more lamentable results of 
self-government or more admirable examples of individual self-help. 

Capital is proverbially cautious, and the settlement and maintenance of New 
Amsterdam, or as we shall hereafter call it, New York, was primarily a business 
investment. Its policy, therefore, was conservative, without being obstinate or 
reactionary. The question, "Will it pay?" became habitual to it. It was so 



DIPLOMACY OF THE DUTCH SETTLERS. 



r-i 



politic in its treatment of the Indians that when the early traders suffered from 
Indian treachery, they did not retaliate. Their business was to trade, not to 
fight. It was impossible for the two races to live in perfect harmony ; there 
were occasional raids and counter-raids, massacres and counter-massacres ; but 
these were exceptions to the general policy. Even when the savages in 1655 
stealthily attacked the town while off its guard, killed a hundred men, women, 
and children, took a hundred captives and totally destroyed twenty-eight planta- 
tions, the Dutch did not forget their prudence. For revenge, " they awaited 
God and the opportunity." For the time being, they were satisfied to ransom 
the captives by gifts of firearms and to patch up a peace. 




5ENERAL VIEW ( >F THE NEW YORK CITY HALL. 



Under this diplomatic, if pusillanimous, management, the hamlet-metropolis 
of the New Netherlands so prospered, that in 1653 it could entitle itself a 
city, for it then had, including negro slaves, about a thousand inhabitants, and 
boasted a pier for its shipping, a market stand for country produce and a yearly 
cattle fair. It contained a number of good stone dwellings, which had "a sub- 
stantial and aristocratic air, as if inhabited by people of wealth and cultivated 
tastes." Indeed there were not a few families in the city at the time who were 
well-connected in Europe. "Some of these people have the breeding of 
counts," wrote one English writer, " and I cannot conceive how such is acquired." 
Private tutors were employed in all the wealthy families. By 1676 the gay 



728 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



apparel of the landed proprietors contrasted strangely with the sombre garb of 
their Puritan neighbors of New England. Compared with Boston, New York 
was aristocratic in social life and customs. Its landed gentry had their coaches 




'Alls CHURCH, NEW YORK, FROM CHURCH STREET. 



and six, with gilded trappings, their household of negro slaves, their horse races. 
In fashionable society even the funerals were conducted with a ceremonial which 
must often have been appalling. Meanwhile the poorer classes lived quietly 



SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE AROUSED. 729 

and with measurable contentment In spirit, New York was as cosmopolitan in 
the seventeenth century as ii is to day. The chances it offered to make money 
had drawn to its shores impartially nun oi all nations, classes, and creeds. Its 
very founders had come from a cosmopolitan country and were cosmopolitans 
themselves. By 1042 the English residents rivaled the hutch in numbers and 
influence, so that an official interpreter had to be appointed because oi the 
bi-lingual nature oi the place. In the same year began the French Huguenot 
immigration, while twenty years later saw the entrance oi Swedes, ( iermans, and 
other nationalities. 

Expediency is a great smoother-away oi prejudices, and New York, whose 
course has always been directed, or at least modified, by worldly prudence, has 
given harbor to all kinds of religion, to many kinds of morality, and to not a few 
diverse kinds of political faith. It has interfered with matters of conscience only 
in exceptional instances, and it interferes in matters of morality only in extreme 
cases. To this day, there is probably less moral and less provincial coercion in 
New York city than in any other city of the Union. It the colonists themselves 
ever felt a persecuting zeal, it was discouraged by their foreign rulers. The 
West India Company deprecated sectarianism, but thought " it best not to (heck 
population." "You had better let every one remain free," it wrote, "as long 
as he is modest, moderate, his political conduct irreproachable and he does not 
offend others or oppose the government." When the English took possession 
they claimed that "no person who professed Christianity was to be lined or 
imprisoned for differing in opinion on matters oi religion," and the same edifice 
was used tor both the Hutch Reformed and the ( lunch of England services. 

[688-1 765. 
But the year 1 OSS bee-ins a new epoch in the city's history. It was the 
year in which the Hutch William, entering England, forced his father in law. the 
last of the Stuarts, to abdicate and then mounted the throne himself. The 
change was a triumph for liberalism, but it was also — so thought the self-impor- 
tant Hutch inhabitants of the city — a triumph lor the Hutch. Their patriotism, 
as well as their love of independence, was fired when the first rumors of Wil- 
liam's success reached them. They waited lor no authoritative information. 
The revolution in England they imitated in Dogberry fashion in New York. In 
behalf of liberty, King William and the 1'rotestant religion, they drove out the 
Stuart officials, and under the leadership of an arbitral-)', self willed, and ignorant 
man, one facob Leishe, usurped all the functions of government. Never has 
the city government been conducted in so high-handed a fashion as under his 
ostensibly democratic rules, furies were intimidated, reporting of trials was 
forbidden, ami men of unquestioned integrity were cast into prison because of 
their political opinions. The people breathed more freely when a legally 



73° 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



- ;.: '•„- ;■• 



appointed English Governor recaptured the city from the usurper, and the very 
mob which had elevated Jacob Leishe jeered at him as he went to execution. 

The spirit of independence once roused, however, was not easily allayed. 
Certainly King William did nothing to allay it. He was much too busy to 
devote time and thought to his American colonies, and from the date of his 

accession on, there was a marked deterioration 
in the character of the English governors. 
Arbitrary, unskilled and petty in character, 
they kept the New Yorkers in a constant state 
of irritation. The rights of the colonists were 
more and more disregarded at the very time 
when the colonists were becoming more and 
more sensitive to their rights. It was no 
longer business interests, but whim which de- 
cided the conduct of the colony. Little by 
little, however, the colonists wrested rights and 
privileges from their English rulers. Through 
their representative assembly, which passed 
upon all appropriations, they held the purse- 
strings of the province, and emulating the 
example of the House of Commons, starved 
the colonial administration into submission. 
Nowhere else, the most celebrated of Ameri- 
can historians testifies, did the legislature so 
nearly exhaust and appropriate all executive 
authority, as in New York. 

Its difficulties with the English governors, 
however, did little, if anything, to check the 
growing prosperity of the city. It has made 
all things work together for its own good. 
It has turned its apparent tribulations and its 
days of freedom from tribulation, its days of 
war and its days of peace, its spasms of virtue 
and its lapses into injustice and corruption, 
store at 55 broadway, new yokk. all to financial profit. Slave labor filled the 

pockets of its citizens in the seventeenth 
century, the war of emancipation enriched them in the nineteenth ; the 
war of 1 812, even though it destroyed their merchant marine, increased 
their wealth. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that before the close of 
the seventeenth century, New York had begun to fatten on the merchandise 
of pirates. Rakishdooking vessels were often to be seen at anchor in the 




PIRACY, 



73* 



harbor, and richly-dressed and heavily-armed strangers were welcomed at the 
taverns. This was the time of Captain Kidd and his* fashionable wife. (See 
Chapter VI. ) Fortunes were mysteriously enhanced. Men of mark in the 











SMBwawsrBP"^'^^^™" 









1 \ 11 LNGE BUILDING, NEW YORK. 



community naturally, and perhaps justly, fell under the suspicion. It was not 
until England with a heavy hand had put down piracy, that New York again 
turned all her energies to legitimate commerce. 

By 1750 the town, though it was still smaller than Boston or Philadelphia, 



732 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

was probably quite as opulent. The streets still crooked, often, but they were 
spacious and well built, and most of them were paved, except when good drainage 
made it unnecessary. The place seemed like a garden. Town conveniences 
had greatly increased in the half-century. A pilot boat had been stationed in 
the harbor to inspect all incoming vessels and so served as quarantine. Two 
fire-engines had lately been imported from abroad and twenty-four able-bodied 
men had enlisted as a fire company. Over the rough corduroy roads a mail 
was soon to go, three times a week in summer and once a week in winter, 
between New York and Philadelphia. Two newspapers filled with foreign news, 
custom-house entries, and local comments, were issued from New York presses, 
and the theatre had started well with the play of Richard III. 

In the neighborhood of New York were the large manor houses, peopled 
by a retinue of slaves and household servants, furnished with elegance and 
usually surrounded by an English park. Long Island, the Connecticut shore, 
the banks of the Hudson, the interior of New Jersey, were full of village life 
and activity. Poverty had kept pace with prosperity, and with increase of wealth 
had come the inevitable poor-house and the jail. There were many poor and 
many turbulent. Society was still aristocratic and consisted of six distinct 
classes ; the large landed proprietors, the merchants and small landed proprie- 
tors, the small freeholders, with whom the suffrage stopped, the free workmen, 
the white bond-servants — a dangerous class — and the negro slaves. But each 
of these classes was growing restive under its yoke. Each year the English 
officials met with greater opposition from the landed proprietors, and each 
year the landed proprietors had greater trouble over their fugitive slaves. 
The spirit of revolution was in the air. 

I765-I783- 

The French and Indian war which came to a close in 1 763 had proved a 
heavy expense to Great Britain, and parliament naturally attempted to shift 
part of it upon the colonies. The colonies objected. This was the occasion 
of revolution. The true cause lay further back. America had grown too large 
and too heterogeneous to be ruled from over-sea, except with the greatest tact, 
and the English just then lacked that tact. On the other hand, America had 
produced a number of native statesmen of exceptional abilities who could solve 
its problems. Self-government would produce better results than colonial 
government, and self-government the colonies would have. 

In 1765, a general congress of the colonies was held in the city to protest 
against the Stamp Act. Dependent as New York was upon her shipping, she 
was the first to recommend a non-importation of English merchandise. As a, 
means of retaliating upon Great Britain, she took the first weapon at hand — 
finance. Before the spring of 1775 had drawn to its close, loyalty, according to 



FROM 1765 TO i 77 6. 



733 



the standards of the community at large, meant allegiance to the colonial, not 
to the British cause. It was England's policy to pet the province of New York 
into compliance. In the hope that she might be reconciled, the English foreign 
office offered to advance her interests over those of her neighbors, and General 
Gage, in charge oi the New York garrison, withheld his troops from coercive 



measures, even to the verge of pusillan- 
was not to be reconciled. To be sure, the 
ers were at a little later time detected in 
of the wealthiest and most aristocratic 
into the Tory ranks because of the violence 
the legal representatives of the city were 
there was a large class in the community 
indifferent to the turn affairs might take, 
but <dad for any chance to eneaee in 



imity. But New York 
lowest class of liquor deal- 
a Tory conspiracy; many 
land-owners were drawn 
of the Whig mobs, and 
opposed to rebellion, while 




nil. OBELISK IN CENTRAL PARK, M « VORK. 



disorder. In the main, however, the city was genuinely enlisted in the anti- 
British movement. The New York populace hailed with delight the news of 
the skirmish at Lexington ; they took possession of the; City Hall and armed 
themselves with the ammunition it contained ; they unloaded two vessels laden 
with flour and other supplies for the British troops in Massachusetts ; they 
detained all vessels bound for any of the British possessions ; they seized the 



734 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



keys of the custom-house and dismissed its officers ; they destroyed a Tory 
press ; they disarmed the British troops who were embarking for Boston ; and 
finally, repudiating their official Assembly, they elected an extra-official com- 
mittee to direct affairs for the patriot cause. 





MU'.h.Xtti inn LEMJ'.Tl.KY. 



In the latter part of March, 1776, word reached New York that Boston had 
been evacuated by the British. Soon after Washington arrived, at the head of 
twenty-seven thousand raw troops, to defend the city against Lord Howe's 
thirty-one thousand. In June Lord Howe appeared in the vicinity and began 
offensive operations. On July 9th the Declaration of Independence was read 



IN POSSESSION OF THE BRITISH ARMY. 735 

in the city, to the American troops and the assembled people, and was greeted 
with riotous applause. On the fifteenth of September, after much brilliant 
military manoeuvring on his part, Washington was forced to leave the city and 
it fell into the hands of the British. The patriot civilians tied, taking with them 
whatever portable property they had, even to the brass knockers on the doors. 
They were wise. For over seven years the city remained in the hands of the 
British. Lean years they were. Occasionally reconnoitering rebels might be 
seen on the heights of Hoboken ; once a large French fleet sailed into the lower 
harbor ; but no real relief came. The city was devastated by fire and pillaged 
by the soldiery. Trade ceased and there was no employment for laborers. 
Provisions became scarce and extravagantly high. The fruit trees and shade trees 
had to be cut down for fuel, while the poor did as best they could by burning 
fat. Thousands of prisoners were in wretched condition and from ten to twenty 
of them died daily. A disorderly community sprang up, called " Canvas Town." 
The adjacent country was impoverished by guerilla warfare. The Tories were 
plundered by irresponsible Patriot mobs and plundered the Patriots in turn, 
while the lawless British and Hessian soldiery plundered both Patriot and Tory 
with impartial maliciousness. Such was the condition of New York throughout 
the American Revolution, but on November 25, 1783, after peace had been 
signed a year, less five days, the British troops sailed for home. Strange to say, 
the war had apparently not retarded New York's growth. In 1775 it numbered 
twenty thousand inhabitants ; in 1 783, twenty-four thousand. 

1 783-1825. 

In the very heat of war, New York had been preparing a State constitution 
for itself, and, when peace was declared, it had its governor in office, its supreme 
court in session, its government completely organized. This was fortunate, 
since litigation increased at an alarming rate after the city passed into the 
hands of the Americans. The forfeited city estate of one Tory alone was sold 
for $234,198.75. 

Confusion, however, did not last long. In 1784 the Chamber of Com- 
merce was reorganized. Between the years 1 786 and 1 796 the population nearly 
doubled. Rents rose, in some instances to twice their former figure. New 
houses went up rapidly ; the streets were cleaned and the pavements mended. 
From 17S4 to 1790 New York was the capital of the country, and every pleas- 
ant afternoon during the sessions of Congress, Wall Street was thronged with 
fashionable promenaders in Parisian costumes. Dinners and balls were daily 
occurrences. Little business was done before nine or ten o'clock in the morn- 
ing. Rival cities looked on with an envious disapproval. Municipal fetes, 
parades, and receptions became popular. Every prominent visitor and every 
incident of note was the occasion of a public celebration and display. 



736 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



But while the rich were getting richer the poor were getting poorer.. 
Vagrants were being drawn into the city. Immigration deteriorated in quality 
as it multiplied in quantity. Notwithstanding the fact that the old Dutch 




lil.MKAL VIEW OF THE BROOKLYN l:KII»:F. 



element had been fairly well assimilated by those of English blood, that the 
Indians had lost during the Revolution all of their influence and a great part of 
their numbers, and that plans were rapidly maturing for the enfranchisement of 



BURR AND HAMILTON. jtf 

the slaves, the population was growing more heterogeneous every clay. Turbu- 
lence was on the increase. In 1778 an anti-dissection mob terrorized the city 
for over two days, and no man whose vocation was healing was safe till the mili- 
tary had been called out and had inflicted chastisement. 

Until 1800, New York city was a stronghold of Federalism. Until 1804 it 
was the home of the great constructive statesman of the epoch, Alexander 
Hamilton. But its most representative politician was Aaron Burr. Affable, 
cunning, unscrupulous, he studied every prominent man's weak point and 
appealed to it. From the day that he organized his followers for political spoils, 
New York State has never been without its political machines and bosses. A 
keen insight into human nature and an adaptability to circumstances were his 
chief resources. His powers of trickery were marvelous and were used with 
cynical indifference to his being found out, when once the trick had effected its 
purpose. His duel with Hamilton is a familiar story ; all know how he pursued 
his rival with a murderous intent which there was no escaping ; how they met 
in the woods at Weehawken, and how he returned home, complacent over his 
fatal success. From that day Hamilton was apotheosized. Every organization 
in the city shared in his obsequies. Even the partisans of Burr appeared in the 
funeral procession. Duelling had been an accepted custom, but the peculiar 
malice and self-seeking with which Burr had used it, made it forever after 
odious. The Coroner's jury found him guilty of murder. A fugitive from his 
own State, though the Vice-President of the nation, he wrote later to his daugh- 
ter, "There is a contention of a singular nature between the two States of New 
York and New Jersey. The subject in dispute is, which shall have the honor 
of hanging the Vice-President." Unfortunately he went unhanged. Still more 
unfortunately his evil lived after him. There has always been some one else 
ready to pull the wires which he laid. Indeed, Burr's power had not begun to 
wane before Tammany Hall was founded, — an organization, at first eminently 
respectable, but destined to become for a time the most notorious municipal ring 
the world over. 

The growth of the city received a great impetus from the war of 181 2, with 
all its opportunities for privateering, but an event of much greater local impor- 
tance was the completion of the Erie Canal, on October 26th, 1825. From that 
day the position of the city as the main door to the country was assured. New 
York became more and more cosmopolitan. Its ruling genius was trade. Its 
wealth, its size, its chances for money-making, its opportunities for criminal 
courses, attracted men of all classes within its boundaries. Its population soon 
became too shifting to have much local patriotism or many local prejudices. 
From this time on aristocratic families lost their family influence, however much 
they might retain their family pride. Its coterie of literary men, including 
Cooper, Bryant, and Irving, show no such provincialism in their writing as do 
47 



738 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

their New England contemporaries, a fact which speaks well for New York s 
breadth, but their work has never been remembered with the patriotic gratitude 
with which Boston remembers its Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, and Longfel- 
low. The representative New Yorkers of the epoch were not its men of art 
or literature, nor its statesmen, for of these last it had none, but its Astor, a Ger- 
man peddler who grew rich in the fur trade, its Cornelius Vanderbilt, a boatman 
of Dutch descent who won a fortune in railway speculation, and its A. T. 
Stewart, a native of Belfast who acquired fifty millions or more out of dry goods. 
It was the period of the Nouveau Riche, of vulgar display and pretentiousness. 
The fashions of the day were flashy imitations of Paris. Much of the wealth was 







ill-gotten ; more of it was ill-spent. The wealthy were generous to munificence 
and vain of their generosity. 

The Irish potato famine and the European revolutions of 1848 greatly 
increased the immigration to our shores, and the worst of the immigrants 
remained in New York city. By 1 S60, when the population had reached 800,- 
000. the men of Irish birth and blood predominated in the city ; the Germans 
w«re the next most numerous body and the native Americans only ranked third 
in numbers. Tumults were frequent, from the Anti-slavery riots of 1834 to the 
Draft riots of 1863. When bread was scarce, the mob destroyed what flour it 
could violently lay its hands on, by way of remedy. When the rivalries of 



BUSINESS MORALS. 739 

visiting actors divided the city into partisans of Forest and partisans of Mac- 
ready, the mob divided in an internecine feud. Twenty persons were killed and 
one hundred and fifty were wounded because two actors were jealous of each 
other. The religious differences between Irish Protestantism and Irish Catholicism 
were manifested in the same form of emotional energy. Worst of all were the 
Draft riots during the Civil War. The attempt to draft the Irish into the Union 
Army, while General Lee was marching into Pennsylvania, resulted in the sack- 
ing of houses, the destruction of two million dollars worth of property, the 
burning of the Colored ( )rphan Asylum, the lynching of negro women and chil- 
dren, and an attempt, fortunately unsuccessful, to burn a hospital crowded with 
Union soldiers. One thousand rioters were killed before order was restored. 
By that time the city had been terrorized six days. 

These turbulent, bigoted, and ignorant elements of the community naturally 
affected the politics of the epoch. In 1826 all property qualifications were 
abolished except in the case of negroes. In 1846 the judiciary was made 
elective. By 1850 local politics had become unsavory. In 1857 the mayor 
appointed one body of municipal police and the State another, and the two came 
to blows as to which should be the official preservers of order in the metropolis. 
In 1S70 politics reached its worst in the Tweed ring. There was gross corrup- 
tion and intimidation at the polls and far grosser corruption among the coarse, 
jovial, open-handed officials, then extremely popular, who had the city at their 
mercy and plundered it relentlessly. In 1871, however, the city measurably 
purified its politics. At least the Tweed ring noted the high-water mark of 
corruption. This dishonesty in politics was paralleled though not equaled by 
dishonesty of all sorts in business enterprises. So closed what may be called 
the fifth epoch in the city's history. Meanwhile, except for its filthy streets and 
bad pavements — and the majority of voters are indifferent to both — the city had 
shown wonderful progress in all democratic conveniences. In [825 gas was 
introduced into the city ; in 1831 the first horse cars ; in 1835, penny newspapers, 
though of a very low order; in 1842, Croton water: in [858 the Atlantic cable 
was working. Though the city had suffered from two great panics, in one of 
which 100,000 people were thrown upon charity, Xew York's business men 
had prospered. 

Since 1871 the business morals of the community have greatly improved. 
Cleverness goes not so far, integrity goes further than in the palmy days of the 
brilliant, daring, cynical adventurer, Fisk. Men are beginning to be honest 
toward their rivals as well as toward their customers to a degree comparatively 
unknown in the time of A. T. Stewart. In consequence, business has gained a 
greater solidity and a greater sense and appearance of permanence, — a solidity 
manifest in our massive business houses of to-day. Our great buildings, ugly 
as some of them are. are now built to endure. As our money is being more 



740 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



soberly earned, so it is being more modestly spent. It is no longer gay Paris 
exclusively, but even more the quieter London which sets our fashions for us. 
From early colony days, New York has always spent its money freely, and its 
lavish fetes have either awakened the envy or aroused the disapprobation of 
Puritan Boston or Quaker Philadelphia. In its fondness for expenditure, it in no 
whit differs to-day irom the New Amsterdam of the seventeenth century. But 
it is learning to spend its money with a defter and more experienced hand. The 
wealthy are growing used to their wealth. Good taste is slowly displacing mere 




BOAT-HOUSE AND FLOAT. 



show ; education, though too much of a superficial kind, is displacing ignorance; 
art is displacing mere finery and show. Modesty of manner is growing popular ; 
modesty of disposition, even, is increasing. To be sure, the average New 
Yorker may still secretly enjoy newspaper mention of his private affairs, but he 
is more chary than he used to be of advertising them himself, and, after all, the 
eagerness to hear one's name from the lips of others is better than the eagerness 
to publish it with one's own. To be sure, New York still suffers from the osten- 
tation and vulgar display of newly gotten wealth, but it suffers this usually from 
the hands of new settlers, not of old inhabitants. The city, in brief, is maturing, 



GREAT BUILDINGS. 741 

and with maturity has naturally come a quieter demeanor and a more intel- 
lectual Hie. 

As a result, New York has become the musical, art, and literary centre of 
the country. The Metropolitan Opera House, built within the memory of the 
young men of to-day, is the fitting audience hall for the best rendition of Ameri- 
can and Italian opera which the country has yet seen. Every year those who 
wish to be in fashion and those who genuinely love music, alike gather within its 
four great walls of yellow brick to hear the most beautiful of foreign operas 
rendered by some of the best of foreign singers. Intelligent interest in music, 
as well as simulation of that interest, is steadily increasing, and the promise of a 
worthy American music, dim though it yet is, grows slowly but steadily brighter. 
•' Music Hall," an edifice devoted almost exclusively to oratorios and to orches- 
tral concerts, has been completed within a year and has already made its 
influence felt. Far more important architecturally than either is the Madison 
Square Garden. Beautiful in color, graceful in form, delicate and often exquisite 
in the tracery of its ornamentation, and covering the entire block, so that it is 
marred by close proximity to no other building, it is a constant gladdener of the 
eye and educator of the taste. Unfortunately, the city's architecture is not all 
of the same quality. Only a casual glance is needed at the diversities and incon- 
gruities of its construction to make evident that every New York builder does 
as he pleases. Individual taste and individual tastelessness have free play. The 
height of buildings in the same block varies with an irregularity painful to the 
eye. The style of every nation and ot every age has its attempted imitation. 
In the lower part of the city the most notable architecture is to be found in the 
old-fashioned City Hall, built when New York extended no further north than 
Brooklyn Bridge ; in the Produce Exchange, whose great square tower is a 
landmark far down the harbor ; and in the lofty but massive office buildings, 
which are to be found in increasing numbers near the centre of traffic. 

In the upper part of the city the stranger will examine with the most interest 
the Roman Catholic Cathedral, the Jewish synagogues, the almost palatial 
dwellings of the railroad kings, and the stupendous apartment houses and hotels 
which are growing more popular every year as places of residence. Many a 
prominent building is simply an ugly monument to the childish vanity of an 
owner who was determined to distance his neighbors in height or pretentious- 
ness. Many a facade is a patent attempt at deception, futilely purporting to be 
what it is not. Still oftener an excellent front combines with barren, ugly sides 
of unpainted brick in one inharmonious structure. Yet it is only necessary to 
look back ten or fifteen years to recognize the fact that New York is growing 
more artistic in its architecture. Twenty years ago every new statue or monu- 
ment was inevitably an added misfortune because an added ugliness to the city. 
To-day it may be, as is the famous Washington Arch, unqualifiedly beautiful 



742 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

The public of to-day is also more appreciative of painting. The Metropolitan 
Museum of Art has within the last decade gathered together a remarkably 
artistic collection of foreign and American masterpieces, and the art colony of 
New York is a growing community. The cultivated readers ol the country are 
more and more looking to the Metropolis as the centre of the nation's literary 
life. To be sure our most characteristic national literature is our distinctively 
and avo.wedly provincial literature. It comes from Joel Chandler Harris, the 
Georgian ; Thomas Nelson Page, the Virginian ; Miss Wilkins, the Puritan ; 
Eugene Field, of the plains, and Octave Thanet, of Arkansas. But it is to 
New York and no longer to Boston that the writer in search of his fortune now 
turns ; it is New York which can boast of the most active and the most growing 
literary circle ; it is only in New York that one feels himself in the heart of 
literary America. The metropolis of the country has the wealth and all other 
things are being added to it. 

There is less turbulence in the city than there was in the fifties, sixties, and 
seventies. The Irish have become somewhat used to American privileges. 
They no longer run riot in our city streets, though they still run riot in our city 
treasury. The population is more heterogeneous than ever, but the city has 
become so large as to allow each race to form a community ot its own where it 
can measurably follow its own customs and select its own standards. There is 
a little China in Mott Street, a little Italy in Mulberry Street. That separation of 
class from class which history has over and over again proved to be inevitable, 
is rapidly taking place on Manhattan Island to-day. But with the separation 
comes added freedom, not, as often of old, added tyranny, for industry, enter- 
prise, thrift, constitute an " Open Sesame " to every quarter of the town. So 
unwieldy has the city become that only the practical politician knows the true 
history of its politics ; only the philanthropist its philanthropies ; only the busi- 
ness specialist each of its business interests. Its early characteristics it still 
retains however. Its predominant motive is still the making of money. It 
measures new-comers by no provincial standards. It has room for every man, 
and each man may follow his own bent. There is no moral compulsion within its 
boundaries. The typical New Yorker is never proud of his city, but he is not 
ashamed of it. The place has no other identity than its cosmopolitanism may 
have given it. It adapts itself to all circumstances. Here every man, out of 
business hours, so loses himself in the mass of careless, indifferent humanity 
that he can disregard or obey convention, live penuriously or extravagantly, be 
moral or immoral, without evoking contempt, gossip, derision, or censure. New 
York is not a beautiful city ; it is not an inspiring city ; but it is not a coercive 
city. Here every man is his own master ; here every man may make his own 
public opinion. Here is, as you please, Liberty Hall or License Tavern. 




CHAPTER XLIII. 

THE NEW ENGLAXI) CAPITAL. 

T was on the 8th of April, ten years after the founding of Plymouth 
and one year after that of Salem, that the Puritans who were to 
found Boston sailed from England under command of John 
Winthrop, whom they had chosen to be their Governor. On the 
22d of June they arrived at Salem and were warmly greeted 
by the Governor. Endicott. But the settlement there was in a 
weak condition and the position did not please them. Governor 
Winthrop and some companions made an exploration of the country round 
about, and as a result the whole company moved to what is now called 
Charlestown. Here they initiated the custom, followed subsequently by all 
Xew England settlements, of building a church first and then founding the 
town. Very soon, however, they were overtaken by illness, and so many died 
that they came to the conclusion the place was not healthy, and when, in addition, 
the water gave out, a move was decided upon. On the opposite side of Charles 
River there dwelt, in utter solitariness, a man named Blackstowe, and he, pitying 
their distress, invited them over to him, promising them water and a goodly 
land. 

The colonists decided to accept the invitation of the recluse, and, taking 
their boats, they set out for the opposite shore. In the first boat was a young 
girl, Anne Pollard by name, who determined by some mad caper or other to 
get herself writ down in history. And she succeeded, as you may judge by 
this writing, for while the boat was some distance from the land, wishing to be 
the first to set foot in their new home, she leaped ashore, or rather awater, sadly 
wetting her white stockings, to the great scandal of the staid Puritans. Girl- 
like, the first characteristic she noticed about the place was the great growth 
of blueberries, and immediately began to clear the land around her of this fruit 
in a swift but silent manner. 

This place was called by the Indians Shawmutt, and by the settlers Trimon- 
taine, not, as is commonly supposed, on account of its three hills, but because of 
the three spurs of its main hill, known later as Beacon Hill. Many of the most 
influential of the settlers had come from the vicinity of Boston, in Lincolnshire, 

743 



744 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

and because of this circumstance the order of the Court was passed, on the 
17th of September, "that Trimontaine shall be called Boston," and so the city 
whose story we have to tell was finally born. 

That first winter was a hard one to the earnest settlers. Many of 
the people "were necessitated to live on clams, muscles, ground-nuts and 
acorns. The Governor was seen giving the last piece of meat in the barrel 
unto a poor man distressed by the wolf at the door. " Yet in the midst of all 
this hardship, Winthrop writes to his wife in England, " We here enjoy God and 
Jesus Christ. Is not this enough? What would we have more?" In Feb- 
ruary this want of food had become extreme. Six months before, they had sent 
a ship to England for supplies, but nothing had been heard of her since. In 
their weariness and despair, they had appointed a day of general humiliation, 
" to seek the Lord by fasting and prayer, " when a ship appeared in the harbor 
laden with food. A day of thanksgiving for this ship's arrival was held on the 
2 2d of February, and this was the first observance of our Thanksgiving Day 
custom. 

About a thousand had come over with Winthrop and to these another 
thousand were soon added. After the first two or three crucial years the town 
grew and flourished. One of the earliest industries was ship-building, lumber 
being abundant. In the ships that were built, fish, boots and shoes were 
carried to London and to the East Indies, bringing back wine, fruit, oil, linen, 
and wool. 

The life of these old settlers was hard, plain, and severe. There were no 
amusements, no luxuries, and almost no comforts. The grim struggle with 
Mother Earth day after clay taught the Puritan doggedness and persistence; 
braving the sharp winds and the changeable climate of New England taught 
him endurance ; while his long series of Indian wars imbued him with the coolness 
and the aggressive courage that actual warfare alone brings. In the thick of a 
battle in King Philip's Indian War, one of the old Boston settlers "took off his 
wig and hung it on a tree that he might fight more coolly, to the great terror of 
the enemy, who naturally felt there was little use in scalping such a man ; " and 
it was just such calmness and deliberation, and this kind of training in hand-to- 
hand warfare, that made the old settlers such formidable antagonists later. 

These stout-hearted men and women who had come across the seas to this 
wilderness were Puritans. Their object in coming was "freedom to worship 
God" in the homely simplicity that their conscience dictated. The life of the 
Bostonian of that day was a hard struggle with the rocky soil of Massachusetts 
throughout the week, but on the Sabbath it was transfigured by the solemnities 
and sublimities that a second life opened before him. Starved by the dull, 
monotonous toil of daily life, their imaginations sought and found relief in the 
sublime heights and depths of the invisible world. The Sabbath began at sunset 



a )MMERCE. 



745 



on Saturday and lasted till sunset on Sunday, a custom not yet extinct in some 
parts of New England. In church, the men, women, and children sat in sepa- 
rate bodies, the ruling- elders sitting immediately below the pulpit, lacing the 
congregation, but on a platform above them. The minimum or regulation 
length of the sermon was one hour, but often the hour-glass had been turned 



missed, while on spe- 
or five hours. There 
period, which depicts 
" 1 know you are 
glass." 

sions among the colo- 
the original charter, 
one Province of 



twice before the congregation was dis- 
cial occasions the discourse would last four 
is a caricature of one preacher of the 
him as turning his hour-glass and saying, 
good fellows, stay and take another 
In the year 1692. troubles and dissen- 
nists led the English Government to revoke 
and to issue another in its place, making 
nearly all the New 
England settle- v 

ments, under the 
rule of a Governor 
appointed by the 
mother country. By 
this time Boston had 
grown to be a place 
of seven thousand 
inhabitants ; thirty 
years later this num- 
ber had increased to 
twelve thousand. 
Commerce was the 
great feature of the 
town. In ship-build- 
ing also it was far 
ahead of the other 
settlements. " I be- 
lieve 1 may venture 
to say," writes Lord 
Bellomont, the royal 
Governor in 1698, 

" that there are more good vessels belonging to the town of Boston than to 
all Scotland and Ireland." At one time there were sixteen ship-yards and 
fourteen rope-walks in the town. The ships were laden with beef, pork, fish, 
lumber, and oil, and dispatched to the West Indies, bringing back rice, pitch, 
spices, and logwood. Rum distilling was also a considerable industry of those 




THE MONUMENT ON HUNKER HILL. 



746 77/7:' STORY OF AMERICA. 

days. Commerce was a hazardous business, on account of the large number of 
pirates that infested the seas. When caught they were tried and condemned 
to be hung. Their execution was invested with the most impressive cere- 
monies. "On the Sabbath preceding the execution the condemned man was 
brought into the meeting-house loaded with chains, and there, in the presence 
of all the people, was made the centreof the devotional and hortatory exercises. 
His sins were spread out before him in the face of the congregation, and he 
heard himself presented with all his guilt at the throne of Divine retribution. 
When the day of execution came, a public procession attended him as he was 
drawn in a cart with a coffin behind him. He was executed after more preach- 
ing and praying, in the presence of a vast crowd." Before the execution, in 
of some noted pirates, a sermon on them and in their presence was 
preached, which was afterward published under the title, " It is a Fearful Thing 
to hall into the 1 lands of the Living God." 

lioston now began to acquire an air of great thrift and prosperity. A class 
of distinctly wealthy people were growing up in the community, who began to 
build large, comfortable houses and to take their ease. In the train of wealth 
came luxury in all its forms. Ponderous old coaches rumbled over the carefully- 
kept roads, while the ebony countenance of a negro servant peeped from 
behind the richly-carved doors. An English Governor took up his residence in 
the stately old Province House in Boston, and became the centreof a miniature 
court, with all the customary paraphernalia and finery. He and his retinue 
showed to the wondering eyes of the Puritan settlers the golden brocade, the 
towering headdress, the velvet and the satin of English society. Thus there 
was introduced into Boston all that its founders had fled across the seas to 
avoid. The Governor soon became the leader in a society which rejoiced in its 
routs ami minuets, and which was made tip of the rich merchants and well-to-do 
magistrates in the town. 

England soon began to take a repressive and threatening attitude toward 
her American colonies. She determined to utilize them as would best suit her 
own interests. She restricted am' manufactures that would make the colonies 
independent, and passed laws confining their commerce to herself. Boston 
merchants preferred to buy necessities from other countries than to pay England 
a high price for them. Any restrictions on trade were felt most keenly in 
Boston, whose chief source of wealth was her commerce. Her citizens were full 
of energy and ingenuity, and yet every attempt at advancement was met by 
checks and restraints. The high-strung nature of the people became very 
re tive under such curbs and finally broke away altogether. 

In the year i 765 England went further and proceeded to direct taxation. 
A Stamp Act was passed, requiring that all legal and business documents should 
be written or printed on stamped paper, costing more than ordinary paper. 



BOSTON AND riUi REVOLUTION. 747 

When the act went into effect it excited the greatest furor in Boston. Andrew 
( Hiver, who had been appointed stamp collector, was hung in effigy from an elm 
known as Liberty Tree. On the same tree was hung a large jack-boot with a 
devil's head attached, intended to represent fohn, Earl of Bute. The people 
showed themselves resolute not to obey the act. As only stamp paper was 
legal, business in a large measure was suspended. Courts closed, marriages 
ceased, vessels were unmoored. By common consent luxuries were given up 
and frugality became the fashion. 

In October, 1768, three regiments were sent ami stationed in Boston that 
they might impress the citizens with a sense of English power. But it only- 
stirred up deep indignation ami resentment in the hearts of the people, at having 
troops quartered upon them in times of peace. Continual quarrels raged be- 
tween soldiers and citizens. At last the troubles culminated in the Boston 
Massacre, in March, 1770. A crowd gathered on the evening of that daw ami 
threw missiles at a sentinel in King, now State, Street. He shouted for aid, 
which brought out a guard of eight men with Captain Preston at their head. 
The crowd pushed up around the soldiers, shouting and hooting at them. The 
soldiers loaded their muskets. The confusion soon became so great, that it was 
impossible afterward to tell whether Preston ordered his men to lire or not, 
but suddenly, without giving any warning, they did fire into the crowd, killing 
three men, mortally wounding two others, and severely injuring six more. This 
threw the town into a tumult, which was only pacified by the removal of the 
troops to the Castle. Preston was put on trial, but was acquitted. 

Parliament had passed a bill taxing several staple articles largely imported 
by the colonists. The latter stood by the principle of " no taxation without repre 
sentation," and were united in refusing to buy the articles so taxed. In 1773 
Boston was thrown into excitement by learning that ships were on their way 
from England laden with tea — one of the articles that had been taxed. Promi- 
nent patriots met together and determined the tea should not be landed. ( >ne 
of the ships, the " Dartmouth," arrived, but her owner, Rotch, seeing how strong 
the fueling was, agreed to send her back without unloading her. She could not, 
however, leave the port without a permit from the Governor, and this he refu :ed 
to give unless her cargo was first discharged. Many days were spent in fruitless 
attempts to have the vessel sail quietly away and so avoid any unlawful act. 
According to the law, twenty days were given to a vessel to discharge her cargo, 
and at the end of that time, if not discharged, it was confiscated by the custom- 
house officers. The last day of this allotted time arrived, and a monster meet- 
ing was held, so large that it adjourned from Faneuil Hall to th(- Old South 
Church. Hutchinson, the Governor, had yone out to his house at Milton on 
purpose to get out of the way. Rotch, the owner of the vessel, appeared and 
testified that he had made every effort to obtain permission for the ship to sail, 



743 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



but without avail. He was ordered to go to Milton and make one last appeal 
to the Governor to allow the vessel to depart quietly, and to come back and 
report the result of his mission to the meeting. He could not get back for 
several hours, and meanwhile speeches were made by the leading patriots. One 
speaker asked, "How will tea go with salt water?" and the question was 
greeted with rounds of applause. Hours went by and Rotch did not return ; 
yet every one waited to see what the issue should be. It grew dark and candles 
were brought, which only lighted the church in the dimmest way ; still the vast 
assemblage did not move, knowing they were on the eve of a momentous 

event. Finally, Rotch arrived and 
announced the Governor's refusal. 
Instantly Samuel Adams arose and 
said, "This meeting can do nothing 
more to save the country." He was 
answered by a war-whoop from the 
porch, and fifty men disguised as 
Indians with paint and feathers, rushed 
down to the wharves where the ships 
were moored, followed by the rest of 
the meeting. These fiercedooking 
warriors jumped aboard the ships, 
and, breaking open the tea-boxes, 
threw their contents into the sea. 
There was no riot, no mob, no damage 
done to the vessels. The crowd 
stood quietly by and watched the 
strange spectacle that these grotesque 
figures, ghostly in the pale moonlight, 
made as they moved over the ships 
and relieved them of their cargoes. 
The next day traces of this " Boston 
Tea Party " were to be seen strewn all along the Dorchester shore. 

This was the first distinct slap in the Tace that America had given to Eng- 
land. Parliament retaliated by passing the Boston Port Bill, which suspended 
the trade and closed the harbor of the town. Additional regiments were sent 
to Boston under command of General Gage, who was appointed Governor. In 
April, 1775, came the first active hostilities in the battle of Concord. As a 
result of this battle, the Minute Men poured into Cambridge from all the coun- 
try round about, and from that day the siege of Boston began. Gage allowed 
patriot families to pass out and the Provincials allowed Tory families to pass in ; 
but any such passing was under the strictest surveillance. Along the coast a 




BOSTON AND THE REVOLUTION. 749 

sharp watch was kept, and privateers were continually cutting off the vessels 
that were bringing supplies to the famished English. Gage for his part care 
fully fortified Boston at different points, so as to resist attack. Earthworks and 
redoubts were thrown up and a floating battery of six cannons was kept in 
Charles River. In May, 1776, Gage received reinforcements, and feeling strong 
enough to become more aggressive he determined to fortify Charlestown 
Heights. The Patriots learned of his intention, and determining that if there 
was to be any fortification on the place they had best make it themselves, they 
worked steadily the night of June 1 6th throwing up earthworks. The morning 
showed the British how they had been forestalled, and they determined to 
attack the fortifications immediately, before they could be made any stronger. In 
the battle of Bunker Hill, which ensued, the English were twice repulsed with 
great slaughter, but finally ammunition gave out on the American side and they 
were obliged to retire. A few weeks later Washington arrived and took command. 
The blockade became closer than ever. The number of citizens in Boston had 
dwindled to 6500, through desertion and death. The English troops numbered 
13,500. The privates were a disorderly set, drunken and licentious. During 
the ensuing winter Washington waited for the ice to form in order to cross on 
it and make an attack, but the season was very mild, and when it did form his 
field-officers opposed the plan, to Washington's disgust. Meanwhile, the British 
made themselves as comfortable as they could, and in so doing considered only 
their own convenience. They burnt down old, historical mansions, such as 
Winthrop's house, for fire-wood. They turned the Old South Meeting House 
into a riding school. The officers had their horses and they got up sleighing 
parties. Faneuil Hall was turned into a theatre and different plays were acted 
there. General Burgoyne was rather proud of his abilities as a playwright, and 
it was during the performance of a play written by him, called "The Blockade 
of Boston," and while an actor who was caricaturing Washington was on the 
stage, that a sergeant rushed in, crying, " The Yankees are attacking our works 
at Bunker Hill." At first the audience thought it was part of the play — as it 
came in very naturally — and they applauded vigorously ; but when in a moment 
there came the command from an aide-de-camp, " Officers, to your posts ! " peo- 
ple saw it was acting in earnest, and there was hurrying and scuffling, as soldiers 
and officers rushed hither and thither trying to rub off the paint and tearing off 
their wigs and dresses they had donned for the play. Washington ordered in 
the spring the fortification of Dorchester Heights, and this was accordingly 
done on March 2, 1776. The English made preparations to attack these 
works, but a violent storm arising the attack was abandoned, and on the 17th of 
this same month the British evacuated Boston and Washington and his army 
marched triumphantly in. 

Boston had done her share and was not called on aeain to take an active 



750 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

part in the war, but she had paid dearly for being the one to precipitate the 
struggle. Her population had decreased to six thousand ; when peace came, 
six years later, it was only twelve thousand, while it took ten years more to 
reach the point it had attained previous to the Revolution. Business was 
at a stand-still. Many of the richest and leading citizens had fled, either as 
Tories with the English army, or as Patriots to seek some more secure spot. 
Slowly the city began again to show signs of life and activity. Society began 
to show its face once more, and when the French squadron arrived in 1778 the 
city burst out into a sudden blaze of gayety and rejoicing. The people were 
amazed at the stout, active appearance of the French, and could not comprehend 
how men who lived on frogs could look so strong and hearty. A wealthy 
citizen of Cambridge gave the French officers a dinner, and spared no expense 
to have just what his guests would like. On the table were two large soup- 
tureens, out of which plates were filled with soup and passed to the guests. 
The French Consul, putting his spoon into his plate, fished up, to his amazement, 
a large green frog, who looked for all the world as if he had just jumped into the 
tureen. Taking it up by the leg, he exclaimed: "Ah, mon Dieu ! une 
grenouille," and passed it to the man by his side, whence it traveled around the 
table. As each man in turn fished up a frog from his plate, the whole table 
burst into one great chorus of laughter. The host, till now busied with helping 
out the soup, looked up only to see his guests dangling frogs by one leg, while 
they shook with bursts of uncontrollable merriment. "What is the matter?" 
he exclaimed. " If you knew the trouble I had in order to treat you to a dish 
of your own country, you would know that with me, at least, it is no joking 
matter." 

Mr. Drake, in his book on "Old Landmarks of Boston," tells of a curious 
custom illustrative of the social life of Boston at this time. He says : "The 
reader will, perhaps, experience some incredulity when he is told that before 
the present mode of vaccination, smallpox parties were among the fashionable 
gatherings of Old Boston. The guests were inoculated and withdrew for a time 
from the world. An invitation of this kind appears in the following extract from 
a letter £>f Joseph Barrell, dated July 8, 1776: "Mr. Storer has invited Mrs. 
Martin to take the smallpox at his house ; if Mrs. Wentworth desires to get rid 
of her fears in the same way, we will accommodate her in the best way we can. 
I've several friends that I've invited, and none of them will be more welcome 
than Mrs. W." 

Another writer gives an account of the punishment of criminals during this 
period. " The large whipping-post, painted red, stood conspicuously and per- 
manently in the most public street in town. It was placed in State Street, 
directly under the windows of a great writing school, which I frequented, and 
from them the scholars were indulged in the spectacle of all kinds of punishment, 



GROWTH AFTER THE WAR. 



75i 



suited to harden their hearts and brutalize their feelings. Here women were 
taken from a huge cage in which they wen dragged on wheels from prison and 
tied to the post with ban: backs, on which thirty or forty lashes were bestowed 
amid the screams of the culprits and the uproar of the mob. A little further 
down the street was to be seen the pillory, with three or four fellows fastened 
by the head and hands, and standing for an hour in that helpless posture. 
exposed to gross and cruel insult from the multitude, who pelted them inces- 
santly with rotten eggs and every kind of garbage that could be collected." 




FANEUIL HALL, BOSTON, "llll CRADLE Of LIBERTY. 

Gradually Boston recovered from the effects of the war and began to pursue 
its old love, commerce, once more. As conditions became more and more 
settled, fortune began to smile on the merchants of Boston. This prosperity 
increased in the first years of this century, when the trouble between Napoleon 
and England threw a vast amount of the carrying trade of the world into the 
hands of the United States ; of this Boston reaped her full share. This success 
roused the deep jealousy of England, and she began seizing our seamen and our 
cargoes. This action on the part of England badly hurt Boston's commen 1 , 
but the retaliating embargo instituted by Jefferson nearly extinguished it. The 



752 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

War of 1S1 2 only made matters worse. Everything, however, has its compensa- 
tions, and capital, thrown out of commerce, went into manufactures, stimulating 
their growth. Peace came in 1815 and relieved the town's distress, and during 
the remainder of this century its growth in wealth and importance has been 
steady and real. 

Turning from the old historic Boston and coming to the present city as it 
stands to-day, what are its noticeable and distinctive features ? The topo- 
graphical changes have been enormous. The Back Bay, which once swept round 
behind Boston, cutting it off from the main land save for one narrow neck, has 
been all filled in, so that to-day the words " Back Bay" refer to the handsomest 
portion of the city, the fashionable quarter, covered with elaborate dwelling 
houses and stately churches. Its three hills, once the prominent feature of the 
peninsula, have only one representative left, and it is shorn of half its glory. 
On the top of this hill, just above the spot where the old beacon stood from 
which the hill takes its name, stands the State House, looming up above every- 
thing else. Houses and buildings crowd around underneath, somewhat as 
chickens, nestle under the wings of a hen. Stretching away in front of the 
State House to the south and west are Boston Common and the Public Garden. 
The Common is a place closely connected with the city's past. Many criminals 
have paid the last penalty of the law within its precincts. Somewhere beneath 
the green grass lie the bodies of four Quakers, two men and two women, who 
in the early years of the colony had suffered martyrdom for their convictions, 
and for their dauntless pertinacity in preaching them. Here the eloquence of 
Whitefield held thousands spell-bound, who came hither because no church 
would hold them. Later it has been a famous battlefield and playground for 
innumerable Boston boys. Uncultivated save for its green grass and its graceful 
English elms, it offers a splendid opportunity for peace and rest to the poor and 
weary of the city. The Public Garden is a more modern and more elaborate 
creation. Its variegated flower-beds and winding pond are kept in exquisite 
condition, and on a bright afternoon throngs of people saunter along its Avalks. 
These two open spaces form a small park in the centre and heart of the town, 
and more than anything else justify Boston's claim to be one of the most beauti- 
ful American cities. The very centre of the city's circle, separating dwelling 
houses from shops and stores, the Common and Garden make a beautiful oasis 
amid the waste of buildings. It is true that stores are slowly but surely creeping 
round this space, and that ultimately they must entirely surround it, but this, 
though it may mar, cannot take away its beauty or unique position in the city's 
appearance. Running down Beacon Hill from the State House and forming 
the north side of the Common, is Beacon Street, the aristocratic street of the 
town, though lately Commonwealth Avenue has rather disputed the title to this 
honor. In the old houses that lie along the slope of Beacon Hill, their windows 



NEW OLD SOUTH CHURCH. 753 

purpled with the rays of many suns, lived the wealthy and refined of the old 
Boston of seventy years ago, and their children, and the children of others live 
there still. Prominent among these stately residences, stands the old Sears 
house with its convolutions of swelling bay-windows, clone in white granite. It 
is now occupied by the Somerset Club, the most aristocratic and exclusive of 
such organizations in Boston. Along the lower and newer part of Beacon Street 
runs Charles River. This stream would add much more to the beauty of the 
city in general and of Beacon Street in particular, were it not for the fact that it 

" Swells like the Solway, 
Buc ebbs like its tide." 

On certain afternoons the view from the windows of a Beacon Street house 
across the wide waters of the river into the crimson depths of the dying sun, is 
one of gorgeous beauty, but a few days earlier the same scene presents an 
appearance of dismal stagnation. The river has departed apparently for good 
and nothing remains but low fiats, forming a dubious maze of slime and ooze 
and seaweed, suggestive of sewerage and malaria. Nevertheless, "the water- 
side of Beacon Street" stands to the Bostonian for a spot just a wee bit nicer 
than any other place, though the dweller thereon soon learns to pull down his 
curtains when the river is "deshabille" and therefore not presentable in good 
society. 

Commonwealth Avenue, starting from the middle of the Public Garden 
and running in the same direction as Beacon street, is a wide thoroughfare, with 
a broad belt of green shaded by trees running down its middle, and separating 
its two sides. Along its north side are the handsome new houses of the Boston 
of to-day. Here is the grand promenade on Sunday morning after church, when 
the beauty and the youth of the city meet together and bathe themselves in the 
rays of the Sunday sun. 

One of the most interesting spots on the Back Bay or New Land, as this 
portion of the city is called indiscriminately, is Trinity Square. Flanked on 
every side by important public buildings, it offers as handsome a mass of 
marble, brick, and stone as Boston can show. The New Old South Church 
— in distinction from the historic Old South Church down town — is a church of 
great beauty with a very lofty and graceful tower. The handsome new Public 
Library building, charming in its chaste simplicity, and the museum of Fine 
Arts with its elaborate bas-reliefs fill two other sides of the square. Towering 
above all these buildings in interest, in size, in beauty, is Trinity Church. The 
work of Richardson, Boston's famous architect, this building bears a strong 
resemblance to the round architecture of Southern France. Its massive, 
central tower is one of the most striking architectural features of the city. The 
interior decoration and the stained glass windows are most elaborate. In this 

4« 



754 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



magnificent church gathers the largest of Boston congregations to listen to the 
eloquent preaching of Phillips Brooks. The scene in Trinity Church of a 
Sunday afternoon is a remarkable one — the vast assemblage of faces all con- 
verging toward one striking form, the deep silence and the rapt attention — all 
this makes a most impressive picture. Bishop Brooks — as he is now — lives 

near the church in a quaintly 
fashioned house with a 
heavily arched doorway. 
His figure, towering like 
that of Saul above his 
brethren, is a well known 
one in Boston streets. 

Running along the 
South side of the Common 
is Tremont street, rilled with 
stores and shops. It might 
truly be called the "street 
of horse-cars," for all the 
different lines of the city and 
suburbs meet on this street. 
As a result, on the afternoon 
of any week day, Tremont 
street presents the extra- 
ordinary sight of an un- 
broken line of horse-cars, 
blocked together as close as 
they can get, creeping along 
at a snail's pace, the horses 
walking and the occupants 
inside bewailing the day of 
their birth. Lately, how- 
ever, electric cars have been 
introduced, run by the trol- 
ley system and, except on 
Tremont Street, no one can 
complain of their slowness. 
They rush by with a whizz and a burr and a swiftness that would compare 
very favorably with the speed of the ordinary railroad train. The loss of 
life from these cars is understood to be very great, and at first, considerable 
difficulty was experienced by reason of the fright they caused to horses 
A prominent real estate broker was killed while riding on horseback on the 




5 I' IR] - IN BED! I 



BOSTON FIRE OF 1872. 755 

"New Land," and there were many less serious accidents, but any such 
difficulty has now entirely passed away. Washington Street, the next street 
south of 'Fremont, is the principal street of the town for shops and stores. 
Boston has really outgrown Washington Street. It is not broad enough by half 
to accommodate the crowds that throng its sides, and the result is a most tremen- 
dous crush that makes it nigh impossible for the traveler on foot to make rapid 
progress. Pressed on the south by the offices and wholesale warerooms of the 
business part of the city, and on the north prevented by the Common and 
Garden from a free development, the retail stores and shops are having a hard 
time of it and may he said to be undergoing a tight squeeze. The difficulty 
seems likely to continue until they shall have got well on to the other side of the 
Common, which will not be for some time to come. 

It is rather a striking change to pass from the crooked and narrow Wash- 
ington Street to the broad, straight streets below it, with their tall, solid build- 
ings. The fine appearance of this part of the city is due to the fact that it was 
all burnt out in the great Boston fire of 1S72. This fire started at the corner 
of Summer and Kingston Streets and spread all through that district of the 
city with incredible swiftness. Alarm after alarm was sent out until the whole 
fire department of Boston had been summoned. This proving insufficient, aid 
was solicited from surburban districts, and even from distant cities. Originally 
all this part of the city had been covered with dwelling-houses, and when these 
had been changed into stores ami warerooms the small, old water-pipes had 
been retained, and they now proved insufficient to supply the great amount of 
water that was needed. The fire spread in all directions, south toward the 
wharves, north toward Washington Street, in an ever enlarging circle. Special 
trains came pouring into the city, bringing additional engines, but this help was 
mitigated by the fact that the fire had attained such terrific intensity that an 
engine could not be brought near and got into working order before the heat 
made it necessary to remove it or to abandon it altogether. Those who 
saw this terrible sight will never forget it. A tremendous shower of sparks 
and firebrands filled the air, as well as an almost continuous roar of falling 
walls. A glare like that of midday lighted up the streets, which were filled as 
they rarely were ordinarily, with carts conveying property to places of safety. 
The firemen seemed almost powerless before the irresistible force of the fire. 
Finally, different buildings were blown up in order to make gaps which the fire 
could not cross. Washington Street was now threatened by the flames. It was 
felt that if this street went, the whole town would go, and a most determined fight 
was made at this point. After a long and hazardous struggle the fire was checked 
in this direction and then slowly on the other sides. The fire started Saturday 
night and lasted till Sunday afternoon. Before it was finally extinguished it 
had completely devastated a space of sixty-five acres, covered for the most part 



756 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

by wholesale warehouses, and destroyed property worth seventy-five million 
dollars. Boston Common presented a unique appearance that Sunday after- 
noon, being covered by articles of every description, with men standing by to 
keep guard. The temptations to lawlessness were so great that the militia were 
called out, and guards were set around the whole of the burnt district, and kept 
there day and night for a long period. Almost all the insurance companies 
were bankrupt. Though individual suffering was very great, Boston, as a 
whole, rallied with incredible recuperative power, and to-day the burnt district 
is only distinguished from the rest of the city by the better quality and larger 
size of its buildings. 

Boston is well known as a great educational centre, and people come here 
from all parts of the country to perfect themselves in some branch of knowl- 
edge, which they cannot learn elsewhere as well. What then are some of the in- 
stitutions which give the city this scholastic character ? One of the great influ- 
ences in this direction is Harvard College, only three miles away, in Cambridge, 
which many living in Boston can and do attend. Of boys' schools, the most fa- 
mous is the Boston Latin School. For two and a half centuries, the great school 
of the city, it has on its rolls the names of the most famous Bostonians, from Ben- 
jamin Franklin and Samuel Adams down to Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo 
Emerson, and Edward Everett Hale. Situated in the same large and elaborate 
building with the Latin School is the English High School, which gives boys a 
thorough English education, fitting them for any form of business life, as the 
Latin School prepares them for college. The Rev. James Fraser, an English 
commissioner who spent six months studying our common school system, and 
later became Bishop of Manchester, spoke as follows in his report presented to 
Parliament : "Taking it for all in all, and accomplishing the end at which it pro- 
fesses to aim, the English High School of Boston struck me as the model 
school of the United States. I wish we had a hundred such in England." Nor 
are girls without the opportunity to obtain a good education. A high school to 
carry on the education begun in the numerous grammar schools, a normal 
school t® fit girls to be teachers, a girls' Latin school to prepare them for col- 
lege ; all these show the desire to put girls on an equal footing with their 
brothers. There are numerous kindergarten schools in the city. One wealthy 
Boston lady maintains no less than thirty of these schools, under the charge of 
fifty different teachers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a scientific 
school of very high character, whose diplomas are second to those of no Institution 
of the kind in the country. It gives men a scientific education to fit them for 
departments of applied science, such as engineering, surveying, and architecture, 
ami has a membership of some five hundred students. Boston University is a 
thriving and prosperous college, with an annual attendance of a thousand 
students. Its school of theology is the most important of the seminaries of the 



BOSTON CHARACTERIZED. 737 

Methodist Church. Other institutions of an educational character, such as the 
Lowell Institute, a famous course of lectures, the American Society of Arts and 
Sciences, the Boston Society of Natural History, the New England Conserva- 
tory of Music, with its fifteen hundred students ; The Boston Public Library 
and the Boston Athenaeum ; all these we have no space to describe, but we 
have said enough to show how rich and full the intellectual life of the city is. 

It is to be feared that in the estimation of the rest of the country, Boston 
is a soil that grows cranks with great frequency ; a place where people abandon 
themselves to every form of ism and remain constant to nothing but Browning ; 
where the women wear short dresses and spectacles, and where people in gen- 
eral devote themselves to the promulgation of impracticable theories. An 
exaggeration, however extreme, must have some basis of truth, if only in order 
that it may be an exaggeration, and there is a substratum of fact in this view. 
Boston is decidedly an independent place, and it was just this spirit of inde- 
pendence that made it the " Cradle of the Revolution " in the last century, and 
the cradle of the Abolition movement which led to the Civil War in this cen- 
tury. In these days of quietness and peace, such energy works itself off in 
eftorts toward Woman Suffrage and the solution of the temperance question. 
Then again this independence, combined with an earnest desire for a good edu- 
cation and the best knowledge, tends to engender cranks, that is, people who 
have opinions of their own and the courage to act up to them, even though the 
opinions are sometimes one-sided and mistaken. A city of cranks means a city 
that fosters individuality and in the production of many men of "one idea," 
you will get a few who have "one idea " that the world sorely needs. Garrison 
and Phillips were men with one idea — namely, that slavery was wrong, and it 
is hard to see how they could have made the country listen to them, unless they 
had preached this truth with exaggerated intensity, and as if it were the only 
truth in the whole world. 

The United States is a small world, and for its full development needs all 
kinds ; the independent, "cranky," book-loving disposition of Boston, as well 
as the pushing, "hustling " quality of Chicago. By giving each district of the 
country an opportunity to develop its peculiar idiosyncrasies, we shall produce a 
strong and healthy national life. The city that stands to-day on the banks of 
the Charles, with its famous past, its love for liberty, and its desire for the best 
knowledge, is one of which any country might be justly proud. 



CHAPTER XLIV. 



THE CITY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE 




TROLLING through the closely built-up streets of the Philadel- 
phia of to-day, with its population of more than one million, 
with its two hundred and thirty-five thousand houses, with its 
two thousand miles of streets, and its area of one hundred 
and twenty-nine square miles, stretching out on the north until 
it includes the whole of Germantown and Chestnut Hill, on 
the south to the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill 
Rivers, and on the west taking in the suburban town of West 
Philadelphia ; with its vast park of two thousand five hundred acres, and its 
fringe of manufacturing settlements, it is difficult to realize that this is the town 
of which an observing traveler wrote in 1788 : "At ten o'clock in the evening 
all is tranquil in the streets. Strong posts are placed to prevent carriages from 
passing on the footways. All the streets are furnished with public pumps in 
great numbers. At the door of each house are placed two benches, where the 
family sit at evening to take the fresh air, and amuse themselves looking at 
the passengers." Still more difficult is it to believe that a little over a hundred 
years prior to this time there was nothing of that old Philadelphia but a stretch 
of woodland lying between two rivers, or, as an old chronicler describes it, "a 
high and bold shore, called Coaquanock, ornamented with a fine view of pine 
trees growing upon it." Settlements hail been formed above and below the 
site of the present city. The Swedes had, as early as 163 1, established towns 
and forts along the Delaware, south of the wooded shore soon to be known as 
Philadelphia, while a ship from Hull, called the "Shield," had, in 1678, sailed 
past these shores to settle Burlington, although some of its passengers had 
exclaimed as they passed. " What a fine place for a town ! " 

Emigrants flocked rapidly to the jersey settlement ; but it was not until 
.August, [681, that the settlers of Philadelphia sailed from England in the 
"Sarah and John," commanded by Captain John Smith. Although the site of 
the projected town was not chosen until after, these first immigrants arrived, they 
did not come to an entirely uninhabited land, for in addition to the Swedish set- 
tlements at and near Newcastle, and those of New jersey, a settlement had 

759 



7'^o 



THE STORY OE AMERICA. 



been made at Upland, besides which some Friends had established themselves 
on other points on the west side of the Delaware, titles to such lands dating 
back to 1676, and even earlier. 

After Willian Penn obtained his grant from Charles II he offered such 
liberal terms to emigrants, forty shillings for one hundred acres, and one shilling 
for one hundred acres for quit rent, that a number of purchasers and settlers 
flocked over to the new Province, which was to be called Pennsylvania. " A 
name the king would give it in honor of my father," writes William Penn, who 
seemed to have, himself, inclined to the name New Wales. 

Such of these early settlers as were not blown off to the West Indies by 

our inhospitable gales, landed at Upland or 
at New Castle, and here the founder him- 
self arrived in 1682. One old record reads, 
" on the 27th day of October, 1682, arrived 
before ye towne of Newcastle from England 
William Penn, Esq., who produced two 
deeds of feofment for this Towne and 1 2 
myles about itt, and also for ye twoo Lower 
Counties, ye Whoorekills and St. Jones's — 
wherefore ye said William Penn received 
possession of ye Towne the 28th day of 
October 1682." It is further added, in the 
quaint phraseology of the time, that this 
fact was signified by "the delivery of turf 
and twig, and water and soyle of the river 
Delaware." 

Soon after the arrival of the Quakers 
came the industrious Germans to our 
shores, and later Episcopalians, Baptists, 
and Presbyterians, the latter represented 
by the Scotch-Irish settlers. People as 
earnest and conscientious as the Puritans, with less austerity in character and 
manners, the Scotch-Irish formed no unimportant element in the country of 
their adoption. From among their numbers, they sent to the Colonial army 
some of its bravest soldiers, while every department of the State has been 
enriched and advanced from their dwelling within its borders. 




,]f Philadelphia.) 



" Fair Philadelphia next is rising seen, 
Betwixt two rivers pla< '<!. two miles between.'' 



Thus did Thomas Makin, a learned schoolmaster, write of his native city 
in 1729. Not a city set upon a hill, according to the Scripture phraseology, 



WILLIAM PENN A.XD THE LNDIAXS. 



761 



was this, but one set between two (lowing rivers, whose banks covered with 
primeval growth, and touched with the gold and crimson ol autumn, must have 
presented a fair picture to the old world pilgrims, who came hither in October, 
1682. The first spot within the present limits of Philadelphia upon which the 
Proprietary set foot was the strip of sandy shore by Dock Creek, whose 
"opposite bank was grassy and wet and fruitful in whortle berries." Near by 
was a house in process of erection, the first Philadelphia house, later known 
as the " Blue Anchor Tavern." Colonel Markham, who had preceded Penn, 
had already purchased Pennsylvania from the Indians and received from them 
the wampum belt, in token of good fellowship, accompanied with these words : 
" We will live in peace with Onas and his children as long as the sun and moon 




1 






feST- vlS & f T> /-) - 



'^'0§WMW 




1; It 



I 






ill i/j 



AN uLIl COLONIAL HOUSE, OF OLRMANTOWN. 



shall endure." In order to further cement this union Penn determined to con- 
fer with Taminent and others of the native kings. Accordingly, a council was 
convened at what is now called Kensington, then known as Shackamaxon, where 
under a lofty elm the Englishman spoke to these children of the forest as the 
white man had never before spoken to them, as a brother and a friend. "This 
treaty," says Voltaire, "is the only one never sworn to and never broken." 

An old lady, who saw the Proprietary at the time of his arrival, related that 
when the Indians gathered around him to welcome him "he endeared himself to 
them by his marked condescension and acquiescence to their wishes," adding, 
" He walked with them, sat with them on the ground, and ate with them of 
roasted acorns and hominy. At this they expressed their great delight, and 



762 77//:' STORY OF AMERICA. 

soon began to show how they could hop and jump, at which exhibition William 
Penn, to cap the climax, sprang up and beat them all." It is rather easier to 
believe in the Proprietary's part in this exhibition of gayety and agility than in 
that of the Indians, whose gravity is proverbial, and who seemed ever to take 
their pleasure seriously, after the manner attributed to latter-day Americans, 
while Penn is described by the same eye witness as " the handsomest, best-look- 
ing, lively gentleman she had ever seen." He was only thirty-eight years old 
at this time, and had been trained in all courtly and manly exercises of his age 
and station in life. 

So popular was Penn's settlement that, by the close of 1682, as many as 
twenty-three vessels had arrived in the Province. No adequate provision in the 
way of shelter having been made for such a sudden influx of settlers, many 
of them took refuge in some large caves, that were discovered on the high 
banks of the Schuylkill, until houses could be built for them. In this busi- 
ness of house building men and women toiled together, and we find a quaint 
record by one Deborah Morris, in which she says, " My good aunt thought it 
expedient to help her husband at one end of the saw, and to fetch all such 
water to make mortar of as they needed to build their chimney. The women 
set themselves to work they had not been used to before ; for few of our first 
settlers were of the laborious class, and help of that sort was scarce." 

The first Pennsylvania Assembly, wherein the body of laws was adopted, 
was held on the 4th of December, 16S2, at Upland, whose name the Proprietary 
changed to Chester, in memory of the city from whence he and his followers 
had come. At this Assembly the three Lower Counties petitioned to be in- 
cluded in the government of Pennsylvania. The union of these Lower Counties 
to the Province was afterwards strenuously opposed in the Assembly of New 
Castle, the opposition being led by David Lloyd, and ending in a final separa- 
tion of the counties of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex, which form the present 
State of Delaware, from Pennsylvania. This contest, says a recent historian, 
brought out some of the best legal ability that the new world has known. Such 
legislators as David Lloyd and James Logan being opposed to each other, as 
were John Dickinson and Joseph Galloway in a later and more important chap- 
ter of our history. They in turn were followed by William Lewis, fudge Peters, 
William Meredith, Jared Ingersoll, the Sargents, the Rawles, the Whartons, the 
Tilghmans, and many more, until the cleverness of the Philadelphia lawyer has 
become proverbial down to our own day, which character is well sustained, at 
the present time, by such members of the bar and judiciary as George \\ . 
Biddle, John G. Johnson, Richard M. McMurtrie, George Junkin. and Judges 
Hare, Thayer, fuddle, Allison, and Willson. 

The Charter of William Penn was dated 16S1, and by it all powers were 
vested in him as absolute Proprietary, only yielding allegiance to the king and 



CHARTER AND LAWS OF PENNSYLVANIA. 



763 



his successors. A strong and saving clause of this charter was, that no taxes 
were to be levied by the Crown without consent of the Proprietary. The power 
of controlling taxation was later vested in the Assembly.* This frame of 




IM>1 II -Hi, N'T I I.M.I . l'HIl AUKI.I'HIA. 



government, carefully prepared by Penn, confirmed to the freemen of Pennsyl- 
vania all the liberties, franchises, and properties secured to them by the patent 
of Charles II, the government to consist of the crovernor and freemen, in the 



*Dr. Charles J. Stille. 



764 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

form of a Provincial Council of seventy-two members and a General Assembly 
not exceeding two hundred. By freemen were meant, not only landholders, 
but "every inhabitant, artificer, or other resident, that pays Scot and Lot to the 
government." * The Assembly represented the popular body, the Governor's 
Council the more exclusive and restrictive body ; the one was intended to 
balance the other. Philadelphia was then, and for many years to come, Penn- 
sylvania. The Assembly was first held in this city in March 1683, in the newly 
erected meeting house, -j* a fit place for legislative assemblies that represented 
such paternal government as that of Penn, who had come to these shores to 
try his Holy Experiment of political and religious liberty. Penn claimed that 
the political liberty granted by his Charter was that contained in the great 
guaranties of English freedom, as laid down in the Magna Charta, the Petition 
of Right and the Act of Settlement, while the privilege allowed to every man 
of worshipping God according to the dictates of his own conscience, was not 
granted on the ground of human toleration, but as an inherent right. J What 
the inhabitants of Philadelphia are most indebted to this just and moderate man 
for, is not that he laid out this city with the streets running at right angles, like 
those of ancient Babylon ; or that he chose the site for his town between two 
rivers, which was convenient for commerce, but that he gave to the new 
Province, of which Philadelphia was the seat and centre, a code of laws and 
frame of government which clearly outlined the form and spirit of our repre- 
sentative government of to-day, with its two legislative bodies, and this more 
than a hundred years prior to the formation of the Federal Constitution. 

Everything seemed to promise well for this colony of Penn, founded upon 
peace and righteousness, yet, as an old chronicler quaintly remarked: "When 
the sons of God came together Satan came also. Although the Friends 
and their excellent morals were long predominant and widely diffused, yet 
some vile persons (probably from the older colony of New York and from the 
malefactors of the transportation list of Maryland) urged their way into the 
mass of the Philadelphia population." This derivation of the offender may 
answer in the case of a certain forger, who began his nefarious trade as early 
as 1683 ; but we find accounts, a little later, of a party of gay young men, who 
beat the watch at Enoch Story's, and otherwise scandalized law-abiding citizens. 
It was whispered, and not in very low tones either, that William Penn, Jr., was 
one of the party, and that it was the Deputy Governor, John Evans, who 
administered flagellation to the doughty constable, Solomon Cresson, who, in 
this way, probably gained some experience of the even-handedness of the justice 
which he had pledged himself to uphold. 

* First Charter to William Penn. 

t ■•Watson's Annals of Philadelphia," Vol. 1, p. 18. 

I " Life of William Penn," by Samuel Janney. 



THE PENAL CODE OP PENN. 



76$ 



The following pithy sentence from the penal code of Penn : "They weakly 
err who think there is no other use ot government than correction, which is the 
coarsest part of it," taken in connection with the fact that two hundred offences 
punished in England were stricken from the code of Pennsylvania, shows how 
far in advance of his time were the views of the Proprietary, in regarding the 
relations of the State 
to the criminal. " Few 
changes," says one of 
our Pennsylvania his- 
torians,* "were made 
in the benevolent fea- 
tures of the frame of 
government up to 
1 7 14, although many 
alterations were made 
in its oeneral struc- 
ture." These changes 
came later, marking a 
noticeable departure 
from the mild and 
tolerant spirit of Penn. 
Much of the old leaven, 
however, remained, 
and has found expres- 
sion, if not in the crimi- 
nal code of to-day, 
certainly in Philadel- 
phia institutions of a 
penal and reformatory 
character. Brissot de 
Warville, that most ob- 
serving and apprecia- 
tive traveler, speaks 
of the Philadelphia 

prison, in 1788, as a kind of house of correction, which was strictly in accord- 
ance with the Proprietary's views, as expressed in his body of laws. The 
Duke of Saxe, who visited Philadelphia later, records that he was taken by Mr. 
Vaux to visit one of the prisons, where an effort was being made to do away 
with capital punishment. Such honored names as Vaux, Barclay, Cope, 




CATHEDRAL, PHILADELPHIA. 



: Mr. F. L). Stone, of Philadelphia. 



766 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



Collins Bette, Sergeant, and Garrett have long been associated with the 
work of ameliorating and elevating the condition of the prisoner, as well as 
with such early preventative work as is carried on in homes and reformatories 
for youthful offenders. 

Realizing that effective and permanent impressions can only be made during 
the early years of life, various reformatory systems have been carefully studieS 
by some of the ablest men and women of Philadelphia, whose thoughts have 
been given practical expression in the construction and management of a House 
of Refuge, founded sixty years ago, which for thoroughness of equipment and 
perfection of detail is unequaled by any such establishment in the'counny n 
the suburban adjunct to the institution, a series of cottages provides something 

approaching home life for the youthful 
vagrants and offenders, whom the com- 
munity of to-day, turning back to borrow 
wisdom from our first legislator, is willing 
to look upon as wards of the city which 
owes them paternal care. Other travelers 
who visited old Philadelphia, among them 
the Rev. Manasseh Cutter, spoke with 
enthusiasm of the philanthropic and 
charitable institutions of this city. The 
bettering-house he was pleased to con- 
sider "spacious, having good rooms, well 
furnished, and with a garden laid out in a 
pretty form." In addition to this alms- 
house, established in 17 13 on the work- 
house principle, there was the Friend's 
almshouse, early started, and on the lines 
of latter day philanthropy, each inmate 
who was able to work at all, contributing 
upport of the institution. The Massachusetts parson also 




FRANKLIN'S GRAVE. 



something to th 

. . & lir --— „.„ ""... lac ivia^dcnuseits parson aiso 

visited the Pennsylvania Hospital, while Dr. Benjamin Rush was making his 
professional round, and found it admirable in system and equipment, evidently 
far m advance of any institution of the kind that he had seen. This hospital was 
founded in 1751, with such distinguished names on its early corps of physicians 
as Drs. Ihomas Bond, John Redman, William Shippen, Casper Wistar Philip 
byng Physick, Adam Kuhn, Joseph Parrish, and John Morgan The latter 
established the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania and all 
these wise sons of Esculapius gathered together, in 1787, to found the Collet 
of Physicians. Hiese noble institutions, with the learning and skill that they 
liave served to develop, conspired to make Philadelphia in early times the 



A MEDICAL CENTRE. 



767 



medical centre of North America, which reputation men of such high character 
and attainments as Drs. Samuel 1). Gross, Isaac Hayes, John Neill, Francis 
Gurney Smith, Elhvood Wilson, the Hodges, the Meigses, the Peppers, 1 >. 
Hayes Agnew, whom Philadelphia still mourns, not only as a great surgeon 
but as one of her noblest sons, S. Weir Mitchell, Jacob M. Da Gosta, William 
Hunt, Roland G. Gurtin, Harrison Allen, Gharles K. Mills, and many more, 
have preserved and advanced in the Philadelphia of to-day. 

As Professor McMaster has said, in an able address on the rise of the 
Revolution in Pennsylvania, the history of Philadelphia, during the momentous 
years that followed the passage of the Stamp Act is, to a considerable extent. 
that of the Golonies. We know with what vigorous measures that act was 
opposed, as well as 
the unjust taxation 
that followed it ; but 
the fact that the 
Quaker City was the 
first on the continent 
which adopted meas- 
ures to prevent the 
landing of the tea, 
seems to have been 
overlooked by many 
historians, probably 
because the Philadel- 
phia tea-party was a 
much quieter affair 
than that of Boston, 
and far less dramatic 
and picturesque. A 

meeting of the citizens was held in the State House yard, in Philadel- 
phia, October iSth, 1773, and resolutions were adopted to prevent the 
landing of the tea destined for this port. The meeting in Boston, for 
the same purpose, when the Philadelphia resolutions were approved, was 
held November 5th of the same year. When the tea came to port, 
on the 27th of December, Captain Ayres was not allowed to land his 
cargo, and the agents of the East India Company, in Philadelphia, Messrs. 
Thomas and Isaac Wharton, Quakers, be it remembered, but good patriots 
in their opposition to the Tea Act, refused to receive it. In their own 
account of the affair, the consignees wrote : "Thou wilt observe that as the 
ship was not entered at our port, no part of the cargo was unloaded, either 




BEAR PITS, ZUOUXJICAL i.AI.I'INs. 



768 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



the property of the honorable East India Company or that of any private 
person." :;: 

The story of Philadelphia's part in the great struggle has been told so often 
and so well, that it needs not to be again recited. It seemed fitting that this 
Province, founded on the broadest basis of civil and religious liberty, should be 
the scene of the most valiant struggle for constitutional rights that the world has 
ever seen, and failing in which, that the Declaration which forever sundered 
the tie between England and her colonies should have been written in the city 
of Penn. Carpenter's Hall, where the first Congress of Delegates was held, in 
September, 1774: the building on Market Street near Seventh where the 
Declaration was drafted, and the State House where it was first read and later 

signed, belong not 
to Philadelphia 
alone, but to the 
whole Union of 
States, and to all 
the inhabitants 
thereof, to whom 
liberty was pro- 
claimed by the old 
bell, that is still to 
be seen in Inde- 
pendence Hall. To 
these spots, hal- 
lowed by the devo- 
tion and sacrifice 
memorial hall ok 1876. of their forefathers, 

men and women 
came from all over the land, in 1876, when the nation gathered at Philadelphia 
to celebrate its centenary, and again, in 1887, when they came here to do honor 
to the men who had drawn up a code of laws for the new Republic, which had 
carried it safely through the first hundred years of its life. In the bustle and 
excitement of that first great Centennial, when there was so much to see from 
all over the world, and from the different States such wonderful displays of 
improvement in design and workmanship, there were some who paused in their 
walks through the narrow, down-town streets, whose buildings still retain some- 
thing of the Quaker village simplicity, to remember that these sidewalks once 




* Pennsylvania Mercury, October 1st, 1S91. 
97 and 109. 



"Life of John Dickinson," by Charles J. Stille, 



THE CITY OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. 



?6(j 



resounded to the footfalls of Washington and Hamilton, [ohn Hancock, Patrick 
Henry, the Adamses, and our own Dr. Franklin, and |ohn Dickinson. In that 
old Hall, where the Declaration was signed, a good fight was fought for the 
federation of the States, in 17S7, which it remained for this century to seal with 
the blood and sacrifice of the Civil War. Here were gathered to form the Federal 
Constitution soldiers who had taken part in the long war, statesmen, governors 
'of new States, eminent jurists, and men of affairs. The Pennsylvania delegation 
in the Convention was led by Dr. Franklin, who brought to this his last and 
greatest task, the rich experience of his eighty-two years of political life at home 




WHERE THE IV II. AND ELECTROTYPE PLATES 1-oR lill^ BOOK WERE MADE. 



and abroad. Here also was James Wilson, the learned Scotchman, who was 
afterward appointed to deliver the oration on the Fourth of July, and who, while 
frankly confessing that he was not a blind admirer of the Constitution, was 
ready to assert that, to his mind, it was the best form of government that had 
ever been offered to the world. In this same group was Jared Ingersoll, who 
led the Philadelphia bar, and Thomas Fitzsimmons, the Irish Catholic merchant, 
who generously gave from his treasury money for the relief of the Continental 
army. Pennsylvania was also represented by General Mifflin, George Clymer, 
and Robert and Gouverneur Morris, names still known in the Philadelphia life 
49 



7/0 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of to-day. Are not these old buildings, which resounded to the voices of the 
fathers of the nation, hallowed places, shrines, to which the lovers of liberty will 
ever resort, as the free government, which was here inaugurated, becomes the 
increasing heritage of the nations of the earth ? 

The chief commercial city of the colonies in the last century, Philadelphia 
has in later times been known principally as a great manufacturing centre. 
Various causes have conspired to bring about this result, prominent among 
them the proficiency in handicraft among her inhabitants, induced by the habit 
of learning trades. As early as 1699 the skill of colonial manufacturers excited 
the jealousy of the home government, and we find acts of Parliament against 
the shipping ol wool into the American plantations, while in 17 19 it was 
declared that the erecting of manufactories in the colonies tended to lessen 
their dependence upon Great Britain. The Stamp Act of 1765 was speedily 
followed by Non-importation Resolutions, which were signed by many leading 
citizens, who were extensive importers. This vigorous protest, which meant 
temporary loss to importers, in the end gave a great impetus to -the manufac- 
turing interests of Philadelphia. The convention of delegates which met here 
in 1775, earnestly recommended the observance of the Non-importation Agree- 
ments, and, to provide against the inconvenience that might result, advised the 
establishment of manufactories of woolens, salt, saltpetre, gunpowder, etc., 
urging that associations should be formed for the encouragement of domestic 
productions. 

These facts in her history conspired to advance the manufactures of Phila- 
delphia, to the detriment of her commerce, to which was added another factor, 
the Embargo bill of 1 807, and still later and more important, the building of 
the Erie Canal. This water-way, commenced in 181 7, provided an easy and 
cheap means of transportation for the products of the great West, via Pitts- 
burgh, Buffalo, and Albany, down the Hudson to New York. In 1820 we find 
that Philadelphia merchants were petitioning their legislators in consequence oi 
the decline of the commercial activity of their city ; but the tide had set in the 
direction of New York and could not be turned back to Philadelphia, especially 
as the harbor of New York possessed great advantages over that of the Quaker 
City. Importations of foreign goods and exportation of native products being 
sensibly lessened, the energies of a restless and ingenious people were forced into 
manufacturing! channels. In one department alone, that of weaving, we find 
an increase of 700 looms employed, between the years 181 1 and 182 1, while in 
1834 as many as 224 looms were in operation in a single manufactory. In 1886, 
8567 different manufactories were in operation, employing yearly nearly 300,000 
employees. An enormous business is carried on in the line of woolen cloths, 
carpets, oil cloths, paints, chemicals, the construction of locomotives and other 
machinery, and the names of Matthew Baldwin, Thomas Dolan, William 



THE SCHOOL AND THE PRINTING PRESS. 



771 



Weightman, Horstmann, Powers, Bement, Miles, Simpson, Sellers, Zeigler, the 
Dobsons, Disstons, Harrisons, and Fraziers, are inseparably associated with 
the manufacturing progress of Philadelphia. 

As early as 1683 Enoch Flower opened an English school in Philadelphia, 
and soon after Samuel Carpenter, and other prominent Friends, established the 
first public school in this city, which has later been renowned for its pedagogy 
and has taken the lead in practical instruction, in the lines of manual training, 
free-hand drawing, designing and the carrying out of these designs in wood, 
metal, and textile fabrics. This latest and most important evolution of the 




■\DEMY OF THE FINE ARTS, PHILADELPHIA. 



educational idea has recently been developed on a large scale by the liberality 
of Mr. Anthony J. Drexel, in a beautiful and well-equipped building in West 
Philadelphia, where every advantage is offered to young men and women to 
obtain a practical education in the lines of art, science, mechanics, book-keeping 
and business, domestic economy, physics, and library work. In the plan and 
management of this admirable- institution, Mr. George W. Childs has taken an 
active interest, as he does in all progressive work, especially such as is designed 
to advance and improve the condition of women. Mr. Childs and Dr. Edward 
H. Williams, as well as Mr. Drexel, have made valuable gifts to the museum of 



772 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the Institute, illustrative of the artistic progress of different nations, while the 
Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1S05, offers to the student a number of 
interesting models in painting and sculpture by foreign and native artists. 

The first printing press was set up in the Quaker City by William Bradford 
in 1685-6, while Christopher Sower has the honor of having printed the first 
quarto German Bible in the United States, and of casting the first type. These 
early printers were succeeded by such experts as the Bradfords, father and son, 
Samuel Keimer, who was the first proprietor of a press to rise above the mere 
printer,'" Benjamin Franklin, and other English and German printers, while 
to-day Philadelphia printers may place their pages beside- any in the world, and 
have no cause to blush for the comparison. -j- 

The city from whose press were issued the first English and German Bibles 
in America, and that was foremost in the field of magazine literature, with its 
General Magazine and its American Magazine, and in which was established 
the first circulating library in America, if not in the world, has certainly earned a 
right to be considered a literary centre. Benjamin Franklin and his "ingenious 
friends" little knew, when they carried their books up Pewter Platter Alley to 
deposit them at Robert Grace's house, that they were laying the foundation of 
the circulating library system, and of the great Philadelphia Library, which now 
in its two buildings numbers nearly 200,000 volumes. From this same little 
circle of choice spirits, with Dr. Franklin at its head, came the University of Penn- 
sylvania and the Philosophical Society. In Franklin's "Junto" and in the Philo- 
sophical Society were gathered such learned Philadelphians as David Rittenhouse, 
the first American astronomer, Thomas Hopkinson, who made valuable experi- 
ments in electricity, Thomas Godfrev, inventor of the quadrant, John Bartram, 
and his son William, both distinguished American botanists, and Ebenezer Kin- 
nersly, whose ability as a scientist some persons place before that of Franklin. 
The Academy of Natural Sciences and the Franklin Institute came later to add 
to Philadelphia's reputation as a scientific centre, which has been nobly sustained 
by such citizens as Dr. Joseph Leidy, the greatest naturalist and anatomist that 
the century has produced, Dr. W. S. \V. Ruschenberger, Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, 
who is such a various scholar that he eludes classification, Drs. Harrison Allen, 
George Barker, George Pearsol, and many more. 

" The Muses aid me ! and I'll fain review 
The Philadelphia lounging, scribbling crew." 

So wrote John Davis in 1805, but he must have found the list a rather exten- 
sive one before he concluded his satirical catalogue of Philadelphia writers. If 

* "Issues of the Press in Penn'a, 1685-1784," by Charles R. Hildeburn. 
f It is interesting to know that the type from which these pages are printed was cast in the 
oldest and largest type-foundry in America. 



SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 



773 



James Logan, Thomas Makin, and Aquila Rose, were writing poetry in very 
early times, Francis Hopkinson and Mrs. Ferguson were at it in Revolutionary 
days ; although Hopkinson's prose deserves a higher place than his poetry, and 
later still his son is writing "Hail Columbia!," while from this quiet literary 
centre, that makes no stir about its geniuses, came Elizabeth Lloyd's beautiful 
and most Miltonic poem, " Milton's Prayer for Patience." So, in later times, 
such scholars as Dr. 
Joseph Thomas, Dr. Wil- 
liam H. Furness, Dr. 
Horace Howard Fur- 
ness, our great Shakes- 
pearean, whose learning 
is sufficient of itself to 
make any city a literary 
centre, Dr. Robert Ellis 
Thompson, Dr. Morris 
fastrow, ]r., and many 
others, have been con- 
tent 

" To scorn delights and live 
laborious days," 

lor the enrichment of 

the reading and thinking 

world. In another group 

of poets and writers we 

find the Mitchells, father 

and son, Harrison S. 

Morris, Francis Howard 

Williams, Henry Phillips, 

Jr., Albert H. Smythe, 

Richard Harding Davis, 

James E. Garretson, S. 

Decatur Smith, Jr., the 

Walshes, and until very 

lately Charles Henry Luders and Walt Whitman. In this group are not a 

few women, — Rebecca Harding Davis, Eliza S. Turner, Agnes Repplier, 

Florence Earle Coates, Mrs. S. C. F. Hallowell, Mrs. A. L. Wistar, Mrs. 

Owen J. Wistar, and our women scholars of Egyptology and folk lore, Mrs. 

Cornelius Stevenson and Mrs. John Harrison. 

I he social life of Philadelphia deserves a separate chapter, so distinctive 
are its features, with its Assembly balls, established in 1 74S and, with some 




l'ENNSYI.V\NIA RAlI.RllAH STATION'. 



774 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

modifications, continued to the present time ; its Wistar parties, representing 
its grave and more intellectual side, started early in the century, and recently 
revived ; its Carey vespers ; its Contemporary Club, where men and women 
meet together to discuss subjects of literary, scientific and general interest ; also 
certain very delightful receptions held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 
where are gathered together men prominent in all learned professions and pur- 
suits. In the spacious buildingon Locust Street, which this Society now occupies, 
there is ample space to exhibit to advantage its rich treasures in the form of early 
imprints, original letters and MSS. and very important State documents. This 
already large collection has recently been enriched by the gift of Mr. Ferdinand 
Dreer's large collection of autographs, and by the unique collection of colonial laws, 
and books relating to American history, gathered together by the late Charle- 
magne Tower. All these treasures, with a vast array of books on American 
history, conspire to render the attractive rooms of the Historical Society a 
favorite resort of the student of history and genealogy. Here are to be found 
every clay such scholars as Prof. John B. McMaster, Prof. Seidensticker, Dr. 
Charles J. Stille, and its President, J. Brinton Coxe, while among experts in 
Americana, Washington portraits, and genealogy are Charles R. Hildeburn, 
F. D. Stone, William S. Baker, Gilbert Cope, Judge Samuel W. Pennypacker, 
J. Granville Leach, Howard Jenkins, Howard W. Lloyd, John Thompson, 
Charles P. Keith, and John W. Jordan. 

The home-loving Philadelphians may not boast as many clubs as New 
York, Chicago, and other large cities, but they claim the honor of possessing 
the oldest club in the world, the Schuylkill Fishing Company. The Beef-steak 
Club, of London, antedates this organization, but as it was suspended for a 
time, the Schuylkill Fishing Company, established in 1732, carries off the 
honors of seniority, being, as its latest historian states, "the oldest social organi- 
zation speaking the English language." A club that numbered among its early 
members fames Logan, Samuel Morris, Dr. }ohn Morgan, and John Nixon, 
who read the Declaration of Independence from the State House, and that 
entertained such visitors as Washington and Lafayette, certainly deserves a 
high place in the annals of clubs. Among other large clubs are the Philadelphia 
Club, the Rittenhouse, the University, the Markham, the Penn, the Art, Manu- 
facturers, the Catholic, and last, but by no means least, two successful women's 
clubs, the New Century, which occupies its own house, on South Twelfth Street, 
and the Acorn, the former a philanthropic and literary organization, the latter 
purely social. 

AXXE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON. 




CHAPTER XLV. 

THE CITY OK THE WORLD'S FAIR. 

HUGE morass, extending- to the westward far beyond the range 
of human vision ; level, monotonous, and savage ; noisomely 
reeking beneath the burning dog-days' sun. Through it a 
muddy, sluggish stream, the sewer of the swamp, making its 
devious way to the sharp line where the wilderness of sloughs 
gives place to the wilderness of unsalted waves. Laboriously 
paddling down that stream to its embouchure, two weary voy- 
agers, worn with their journey through forests and over prairies 
for a thousand miles, — one a Christian priest, in quest of heathen souls ; the other 
a shrewd adventurer, seeking the heathens' gold. That was Chicago in August, 
1673. 

The second city of the Western Hemisphere, with a million and a quarter 
of inhabitants ; the greatest railroad centre in the world, and one of the chief 
shipping ports ; a city of splendid palaces and noble thoroughfares ; a capital 
surpassed by few in any land in size, in wealth, in culture, in all the elements of 
civilization and of human greatness. That is Chicago to-day. 

And these two pictures, and the swift, shifting scenes that lead from the one 
to the other, form one of the most impressive acts in the time-long drama of 
human progress. 

The first white men to visit the site of Chicago were Father Jacques Mar- 
quette and Louis Joliet, in August, 1673, returning to Canada from their visit to 
the Upper Mississippi. They made no stopping there, nor did the place invite 
it. In all their wanderings they had scarcely seen a more forbidding region. 
And for a century thereafter, whoever may have passed by the spot, no hardy 
settler ventured to make it his abode. Other towns were founded and began 
their growth — Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati. But the promise of 
Chicago slumbered in the swamps. The river alone bore its present name, an 
Indian term, meaning — for shame, O Muse of History! — "skunk," and given to 
it by the red men because of the great number of those odorous animals found 
in the woods and morasses. During the French and Indian war a temporary 
fort was made there, but was soon abandoned. From 1779 to 1796 a negro 

775 



776 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



from Santo Domingo, by name Baptiste Desaible, held rude sway as a trader 
among the Pottawattomie Indians, his cabin standing on the north bank of the 
river. In the year last named he sold out to one Le Mai, a French trader, and 
the latter remained there a lew years longer. 

But the real history of Chicago dates from July 4, 1803. After belonging 
to Spain and to France, the country had at last come into American ownership, 
and the United States Government took formal possession of it by erecting a 
number of frontier forts. One of these was at Chicago. Captain John Whist- 




A CHICAGO MANSION IN l8l2. 



ler, commanding at Detroit, was sent to found it. With his family he went 
thither in a sailing vessel, and cast anchor at the mouth of the river just in 
time to celebrate Independence Day. There, at what is now the corner of River 
Street and Michigan Avenue, he built Fort Dearborn — two block houses, a pali- 
sade enclosing a vegetable garden, and a warehouse outside for trading pur- 
poses. Logs were the material used, and the style of architecture conformed 
thereto. Sixty-two officers and men formed the garrison, with three small 
pieces of artillery. 



THE EARLIEST SETTLERS. 777 

The next spring, John Kinzie a Canadian silversmith, came thither, took 
possession of Baptiste Desaible's old cabin, and became a trader with the 
Indians. He enlarged the cabin, as need was, from time to time, until it be- 
came a large and comfortable family residence, — the first in Chicago. And his 
daughter, Ellen Marion, in 1805, was the first white child born at Chicago to a 
permanent resident. The cut on the opposite page is a fair illustration of the 
rude frame dwellings which began to be put up about this time, and within the 
memory of older settlers. 

Such was the founding of the city. At first its growth was slow. In 18 12 
there were outside the fort only Kinzie and his family, a family named Burns, 
and a French laborer named Willamette ; and four miles up the south branch of 
the river two farmers, White and Lee, and three French laborers. When the 
war with England began in that year the Indians became hostile. White and 
one of his men were killed, and the other settlers fled to the fort for safety. 
Captain Heald was then in command, and after some futile negotiations he deter- 
mined to evacuate and abandon the whole place. They had not got far away 
from the fort, however, before they were attacked by the Indians and more than 
half of them killed. Fort Dearborn was burned, and the embryo town seemed 
to have been destroyed. 

But in that year the Territory of Illinois was organized ; six years later it 
became a State; and in 1S29 steps were taken to construct the Illinois and 
Michigan Canal, of which the Chicago River would form a part. In 1831 Cook 
County was established, with Chicago as its seat, and on August 10, 1833, the 
town was formally incorporated. Thirteen votes were cast at that first charter 
election, twelve for incorporation and one against. Five days later there were 
twenty-eight votes cast for town officers. Then a log jail, the first public building, 
was erected. 

The first Trustees of the town were T. J. V. Owen, George W. Dole, N. B. 
Beaubien, John Miller, and E. S. Kimberly, and they laid out the foundation of 
the plan of the great city of to-day. Mr. Dole in 1832 started the slaughtering 
and packing industry, for which Chicago is famous, his year's work disposing of 
200 head of cattle and 350 hogs. Mr. Beaubien opened the first inn, the fore- 
runner of Chicago's great hotels, and a primitive affair it was. " I had no bed," 
Mr. Beaubien once said ; "but when a traveler came for lodging, I gave him a 
blanket to sleep in on the floor, and told him to look out that an Indian did not 
steal it. When he was asleep I took the blanket away from him to give to the 
next man, telling him the same. So I always had a blanket ready." 

But the growth of Chicago must be sketched in barest outline in the compass 
of one brief chapter. The first newspaper, The Chicago Democrat, was pub- 
lished by John Calhoun on November 26, 1833 ; and on April 16, 1834, it began 
a maritime record, announcing the arrival in port of one schooner and the 



77 8 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



departure of two others. That summer a steamboat arrived every week from 
Lake Erie ports, and schooners began to enter and ascend the river. May 18, 
1836, saw the first vessel launched at a Chicago ship-yard, and on July 4th work 
was begun on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. In that year a city government 
was organized. William B. Ogden, Democrat, was elected Mayor by 469 votes, 
against 237 for John H. Kinzie, Whig. The full legal incorporation was achieved 
on March 4, 1837, and in May following the army authorities finally abandoned 
Fort Dearborn. 

The new city was founded with high hopes. Some of the most sanguine resi- 




>F THE ILLINC 



iN'U MH'HIiiAN 



dents believed that it might some day have as many as a hundred thousand 
inhabitants. In that very year, however, there was a serious financial panic through- 
out the country. Chicago suffered much, and many of the people moved away, 
convinced that the place had received its death-blow. Not so was it, however. 
In a year or two Chicago rallied and entered upon a career of great and sub- 
stantial prosperity. In 1838 one of its greatest industries was founded, by the 
shipping of 39 two-bushel bags of wheat. The next year nearly 4000 bushels 
were shipped ; the next, 10,000; the next, 40,000 ; and the next, 1842, nearly 
600,000. Since that time Chicago has been the great grain market of the world. 



RAPID GROWTH OF THE CITY. 779 

The next disaster to the growing city occurred in 1849, when a winter flood and 
ice-gorge in the river destroyed many vessels, wharves, etc., inflicting what then 
seemed the almost crushing loss of more than a hundred thousand dollars. But 
that was soon forgotten. Forty-two miles of the Galena Railroad were in use 
in 1850, and two years later the Michigan Southern line entered the city, giving 
direct rail communication with the East. What progress had been made by the 
city up to this time may be reckoned from the fact that two lots of ground, valued 
at $102 in 1832, were sold for $108,000 in 1S53 ; and some others, held at $346 
in 1832, were sold in 1853 for $540,000. 

The site of Chicago, as stated, was originally a swamp. The city was built 
in the swamp, at the swamp level. Drainage and sewerage were defective, and 
for much of the time the streets were mere channels of mud. About 1857 this 
condition of affairs was seen to be intolerable, and it was seriously proposed to 
raise the grade of the whole city about eight feet. The plan met with much 
opposition and ridicule, but it was finally executed with entire success. The 
streets were filled in to the required depth. As a result, the first stories of many 
buildings — in fact, of most of the city — were nearly hidden below the sidewalk. 
In some cases these were turned into basements and the floors above made the 
main floors. In some cases the buildings were demolished and new ones erected. 
But in many other cases the buildings, being new and valuable, were bodily 
lifted up by jackscrews to the new level and additional foundation-walls placed 
under them. In not a few cases entire city blocks of massive brick and stone 
structures were thus lifted in a single piece eight or ten feet, and even moved 
laterally for some distance, without damage. It was one of the most remarkable 
engineering feats on record. As a result of it, Chicago was made a high-and- 
dry, well-drained city, with excellent sanitary conditions. 

According to the first census taken, Chicago had in 1837 just 4 l 7° inhab- 
itants; in 1840, 4479; in 1850, 28,269; in i860, 112,172, the maximum hoped 
for by the founders having been already passed. And in 1870 it had no less 
than 298,977 souls, and was ready for the most dreadful, and yet perhaps most 
beneficent, event in all its history. 

At eleven o'clock on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1S71, an old Irish 
woman, living at the corner of De Koven and Jefferson Streets, took a kerosene 
lamp in her hand, and went to the stable at the rear of her shanty to see that her 
cow was all right for the night. She set the lamp down, and was getting some 
salt for the cow, when the latter kicked the lamp and upset it. Some straw 
caught fire, and in a moment the stable was a mass of flames. The next 
afternoon the old woman was found sitting on the doorstep of her shanty, which 
had not been scathed, bemoaning the destruction of her stable and the death of 
her cow. But, in the meantime, what else had happened ? 

The fire, beginning so meanly, made swift progress from building to build- 



7 So 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



ing. The city was dry as a tinder-box, after six weeks of hot weather without a 
drop of rain. A large proportion of the buildings were constructed of wood ; 
nearly all had their floors and inner walls of that material. A high wind was 
blowing from the southwest, and — what other conditions could have been re- 
quired for a tremendous conflagration ? The Fire Department was powerless. 
Water only fed the fury of the flames, which made their way across the city bv 
leaps and bounds, clearing a block or two at once. By daylight the fire had 
made its way four miles across the city to Lincoln Park, and it kept on, until 




THE BURNING OF CHICAGO IN 1S73. 

afternoon, westward to the river and eastward to Michigan Avenue. Then it 
stopped, the unbuilt areas and the blocks of buildings blown up with gunpowder 
having formed the only barrier against its ravages. 

It is impossible to describe adequately the fearful force of the flames. 
Buildings of granite and iron went down before them like paper. " Fireproof" 
iron safes, massive iron columns, and solid iron car-wheels were actually con- 
sumed, leaving no residuum whatever ! It was an oxyhydrogen blow-pipe flame 
half a mile wide ! A few figures will give some vague idea, however, of what 



THE PRESENT SIZE AND WEALTH OF CHICAGO. 781 

havoc was wrought in those few hours. The business quarter of the city was an- 
nihilated ; an area of 2100 acres was burned over; 100,000 persons were 
made homeless ; and more than £200,000,000 worth of property was destroyed. 

And Mrs. O'Leary sat on her doorstep, crying, " Oh, wirra ! wirra ! Me 
cow ! me poor cow ! " 

Before the last flames of the conflagration sank in darkness on October 9th, 
indomitable men were clearing away the ashes and beginning to rebuild the city ; 
and in every quarter of the globe generous hands were soon aiding in the work 
of relief and succor. Railroad trains were rushed across the continent at a 
speed unknown before, bearing food and clothing. Foreign nations, even 
heathen lands, joined in the noble work. A total sum of $4,996,782.74 was 
poured into the treasury of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society and was wisely 
administered. Nearly $600,000 of this unrivaled gift remained unused, how- 
ever, and was invested securely, its interest being used yearly thereafter for the 
benefit of the city's poor. 

Most dreadful, and also most beneficent, we have called this event. It was 
indeed a blessing. For the new Chicago that sprang so quickly from the ashes 
of the old was and is a far finer city than the old could have become. Far more 
substantial buildings soon covered the fire-scathed areas, and in two years' time 
most of the traces of the fire had disappeared. Chicago was a new city, more 
splendid in appearance, more permanent in structure, more prosperous in busi- 
ness, than had been dreamed before the fire. 

The population, as we have seen, in 1870 was 298,977. In 1880 it was 
503,185. In 1S90, partly by natural increase and partly by the annexation of 
various suburban towns already forming geographically an integral part of the 
city, it was swelled to the enormous total of 1,208,669 — the second city of the 
Western Hemisphere ! How shall such a metropolis fittingly be described in one 
chapter, or in one volume ! If our account of its origin and progress has been 
so concise as to be meagre, more so must be, in the remaining space, our account 
of the Chicago of to-day. 

The geographical location of Chicago, reckoned from the court-house, is in 
lat. 41 ° 52' 20" N., and 8j° 35' W. from Greenwich. It is on the western shore 
of Lake Michigan, close to its southern end, and on the dividing ridge between 
the great valleys of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, lying about 600 feet 
above the sea. Part of the rain that falls upon the city drains into the lake, pours 
over Niagara Falls, and enters the North Atlantic, and part drains into tribu- 
taries of the Mississippi and thence down the Father of Waters to the Gulf of 
Mexico. Thus the city is the commercial capital of the upper portions of both 
those great valleys. 

It is an inland city, 850 miles from salt water. Yet it is the chief port on 
3000 miles of inland seacoast, if such a phrase may be used, commanding the 



782 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



commerce of the five great lakes, and visited by a thousand vessels a month. 
The tonnage of vessels entering and clearing from Chicago is fully 4,000,000 
tons a year. Besides this is the Illinois and Michigan Canal, connecting the 
Chicago and La Salle Rivers and forming a waterway from the lake to the 
Mississippi, with an enormous commerce. But it is as a railroad centre that 
Chicago's greatness in the world of travel and of trade is seen most clearly. 
The city is the centre of 35,000 miles of road. Thirty-five lines enter the city, 
twenty-two of them being trunk lines. Nearly a thousand trains enter and leave 
the city daily. These make it the market, the capital, of a large and wealthy 

region with 30,000,000 inhabitants. 
The area of the city is 180^ 
square miles, or 115,520 acres. 
From north to south it is 2i]4 
miles long. By the Chicago River 
and its branches it is divided into 
three general divisions, known as 
the North, South, and West Sides. 
These are connected, over and 
under the river, by sixty-three 
bridges and two tunnels. There 
are 2235 miles of streets, lighted 
by 36,000 lamps, and traversed 
by 395 miles of street railways. 
Underneath, for drainage, are 785 
miles of sewers. The water supply 
is drawn from Lake Michigan, 
through a tunnel at the bottom of 
the lake extending out several 
miles from the shore so as to insure 
purity, and distributed to the city 
through 346 miles of pipes. The capacity of the works is 260,000,000 gallons, 
and the average consumption is 153,000,000 gallons daily. 

The pleasure grounds of the people form one of the most notable features 
of Chicago. Surely, no other city in the world has such an array of parks and 
drives. Not in their extent are they remarkable, comprising in all only some 2000 
acres. But in the energy and public spirit with which they have been prepared 
they are extraordinary, and in their general plan and arrangement they are 
unique. They gird the city about on all three landward sides, north, west, and 
south, in one continuous line of beauty. Like the site of the city, they were once 
a level swamp. But engineering enterprise has scooped the earth out here, 
making lakes, and piled it up there, making hills and ridges, until the whole park 




LAKE SHORE DRIVE. 



PLEASURE GROUNDS AND PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDINGS. 783 

surface is beautifully variegated, and the visitor forgets that he is in the land of 
monotonous plains. 

At the north, bordering on the lake for a mile and a half, is the oldest of the 
parks, fittingly named after the most illustrious citizen of Illinois, Lincoln. It 
comprises 250 acres, with eight miles of drives and twenty acres of lakes. Here 
stand the fine Lincoln Monument and the Grant Monument, and here also are 
extensive botanic and zoological gardens. Northwest of this lies Humboldt 
Park, of 200 acres, with its mineral waters. Garfield Park, at the west of the city, 
contains 185 acres, including a seventeen-acre lake. There are also fine con- 
servatories and an artesian well of mineral water. Douglas Park, of 1S0 acres, 
named after the famous "Little Giant" Senator, lies south of this. It contains 
fine conservatories and open fields for ball and tennis players. South of 
this is little Gage Park, ol 20 acres. Then at the south of the city are 
Washington and Jackson Parks, connected by the Midway Plaisance. Wash- 
ington Park is inland, a mile from the lake, and contains 371 acres. The 
Midway Plaisance contains 80 acres. Jackson Park lies on the lake front, 
containing 593 acres. It is in these last two parks and the connecting grounds 
between them that the Columbian Exposition of 1892-93 has its home. All 
these parks, from Lincoln to Jackson, are connected by splendid parkway 
drives, or boulevards, and thus iorm a continuous and harmonious system all 
around the city. 

There are many other separate parks scattered about the city. In the 
western part are Union, Jefferson, Wicker, Vernon, Congress, and Campbell 
Parks. In the north are Washington Square and Union Square. In the south 
is Lake Front Park, containing 41 acres. Dearborn, Groveland, Woodlawn, 
and Ellis Parks, and Aldine Square, also deserve mention to complete the list of 
Chicago's pleasure grounds. 

Dry as are statistics, there is no way of presenting in brief space an idea 
of the magnitude of Chicago's trade other than by means of figures. Here, 
then, is a statement of the actual shipments from the port of Chicago for the 
first half of the year 1890 : Flour, 1,817,997 barrels ; wheat, 4,278,845 bushels ; 
corn, 48,725,179 bushels; oats, 37,927,482 bushels; rye, 1,886,423 bushels; 
barley, 3,639,976 bushels ; grass seed, 41,198,667 bushels ; flax seed, 1,266,655 
bushels; broom corn, 6,009,271 pounds; cured meats, 380,532,547 pounds; 
dressed beef, 500,546,484 pounds; canned meats, 612,281 cases; pork, 171,766 
barrels; lard, 222,111,385 pounds; cheese, 18,424,980 pounds ; butter, 77,328,- 
936 pounds; hides, 91,850,96s pounds ; wool, 13,142,018 pounds ; coal, 216,710 
tons ; salt, 467,793 barrels ; shingles, 46,281,000 ; and lumber, 331,015,000 feet. 
Such figures are eloquent. They cannot be fully appreciated. They dazzle and 
confuse one, as do the stupendous distances dealt with in astronomical calcula- 
tions. But by their very vagueness they impress us most forcibly and tell us, 



7§4 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



better than we can otherwise be told, of the bulk of the commerce of this 
amazing town. 

Or shall we estimate the business of Chicago by the operations of the post- 
office ? That institution employs 1565 men. For its out-of-town work it is 
served by 220 daily mail trains, on 118 of which there are railroad post-offices. 
No less than 1 10 separate mails are closed for dispatch daily, and an equal num- 
ber received and opened. These require the daily use of more than a thousand 
leather bags and three thousand canvas sacks. The annual receipts of the office 
are more than $3,125,000, and the expenses more than $1,130,000. About 
520,000,000 pieces of mail matter, weighing 36,000,000 pounds, are handled in 

a year, not 
counting 
more than 
3,000,000 
registered 
letters and 
packages. 
The trans- 
actions of 
the money- 
order de- 
partment 
amount ful- 
ly to $20,- 
000,000 a 
year. 

A m o n g 
the build- 
ings of Chi- 
cago the 
dual edifice 

used as the City Hall and Court House may well be mentioned first. It meas- 
ures 340 by 2S0 feet, occupying a whole block, bounded by Clark, La Salle, 
Washington, and Randolph Streets, in the heart of the city. It is built of granite 
and limestone, and cost about $6,000,000. A group of three buildings joined 
together, on Dearborn Avenue and Michigan, Illinois, and Clark Streets, in- 
cludes the Criminal Courts and County Jail. The square bounded by Dear- 
born, Clark, Adams, and Jackson Streets is covered by a splendid edifice, 342 by 
210 ieet, occupied by the National Government as a Post-ofifice and Custom 
House. It is one of the most notable Federal buildings in the country, outside 
of Washington itself. 




SIDE VIEW OF CITY HALL. 



PLEASURE GROUNDS AND PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDINGS. 7S5 

The semi-public and private buildings compare, in architecture, most favor- 
ably with those of any other American city. Chicago hotels have long been justly 
famed for their size and luxurious equipments ; the external appearance ot the 
newer ones is also most imposing. Some of the railroad stations are of vast 
size and noble design. There are club-houses which are models of beauty, and 
the array of handsome churches, library and art buildings, theatres, etc., is 
altogether bewildering. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is there to be found a 
structure quite comparable with the so-called Auditorium, a gigantic pile con- 




lllli Al IMlMlurM I.LI I IHNi 



taining a great hotel and an opera house, the latter said to be the largest in 
existence. Nor are the homes of Chicago unworthy of so great a capital. 
Along Michigan Avenue, and other residence streets, are miles of palaces, to 
whose splendors the art of the architect has given its richest resources. They 
generally stand detached from one another, and surrounded by lovely grounds 
and an abundance of shade, thus combining rural beauty with metropolitan 
magnificence. 

Perhaps, however, it is in her business blocks that Chicago justly takes 
5 ' 



786 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



most pride. Not elsewhere can one find an array of office buildings massed 
together, so great in size, so handsome in all appointments. > They tower aloft 
with from ten to twenty stories above the sidewalks, making the streets which 
they line seem like the canons of the Colorado, traversed by a stream of flesh 
and blood scarcely less rapid, noisy and tumultuous than the waters of the 
desert river. In no other city, not in New York, nor London itself, are the streets 
so thronged as in this quarter of Chicago at the hour when the wheels of trade 
are stopping for the day and these great hives of industry send forth their 
swarms of occupants. A single building contains from three to four thousand 

persons, and 
such buildings 
are numbered 
by the dozen. 
Fo r the 
construction 
of these re- 
markable edi- 
fices, a special 
style of archi- 
tecture had to 
be devised. 
No longer was 
it possible to 
trust to the 
outer walls of 
masonry lor 
support. In a 
building of 
eighteen or 
twenty stories, 

the walls at the bottom would have to be so thick as to leave almost no room 
within. The buildings were, therefore, made with a skeleton of steel, an interior 
framework of partitions, columns and floors, amply self-sustaining. Around this, 
simply as an outer garment, the walls of masonry were built; but were the 
latter to be entirely torn away, the building would still stand as securely as 
before. There are stairways in these lofty structures, of course, but they are little 
used. Travel up and down is effected by means of elevators, which, for sake of 
speed and convenience, are arranged after the manner of railroad trains. 
There are some " accommodation " cars, stopping at every floor; some "local 
expresses," only stopping at floors above the seventh; and some "lightning 
expresses," that shoot up to the twelfth or fifteenth floor without a stop. In a 




THE INHABITANTS OF A GREAT AMERICAN CITY. 



787 



single average building, a dual count shows the elevators to be used by 20,000 
persons daily ! 

The intellectual life of this driving, utilitarian city is not neglected. There 
are published 24 daily newspapers, 260 weeklies, 36 bi-weeklies, 192 monthlies, 
five bi-monthlies, and 14 quarterlies, comparing favorably in appearance and 
quality of contents with the periodical press of other great cities. The quantity 
of periodicals mailed at the Chicago Post Office, in the year ending June 30th, 
1889, amounted to more than 20,000,000 pounds, equaling that mailed at Phila- 
delphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and New Orleans, all combined. In the publication 
of books, too, the city has no mean rank. Each year it produces about 8,000,000 
bound volumes, and perhaps 3,000,000 more in paper covers ; and in the publi- 
cation of maps, atlases, etc., it stands second to no city. The public library, in 
the City Hall building, contains more than 156,- 
000 volumes. Its annual circula- -_^ j " a, Ck ^ 3 

tion is 1,225,000 ^J^isSmSmfe 

volumes, of which 
850,000 are taken 
for reading at home. 
The reading- room 
is patronized by 
440,000 persons 
yearly, and the 
other reference de- 
partments of the 
library by 1 15,000 
more. Steps have 
already been taken 

to house this great institution more commodiously in a special building of its own, 
that shall rival, in size and perfection of appointments, any library building in the 
world. 

Chicago has a fine public system of education, including primary, grammar, 
and high schools, and a host of admirable church and private schools and 
academies of all grades. There are normal schools, law schools, medical col- 
leges, theological seminaries, etc., in great number. Two great colleges, situated 
in the suburbs, have long been identified with the city, Lake Forest University, 
one of the chief educational institutions of the Presbyterian Church, and North- 
western University, at Evanston, the great school of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. A third, the Chicago University, a Baptist institution, was founded by 
Stephen A. Douglas, and had a checkered career. It has lately been reorganized 
and richly endowed, and bids fair, in a few years, to rank among the foremost 
seats of learning;- in America. 








HUKncULIVRAI. II AI I 



;88 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

And last, though first, the people of Chicago. They numbered, in 1S90, 
according to the Federal census, 1,208,669. A cosmopolitan lot, too, gathered 
from almost every tribe and nation on the globe. Those of foreign origin 
tremendously outnumbered the so-called Americans. Of the latter there were 
only 292,463, while of Germans there were 384,958. After these, in order, came 
215,534 Irish, 54,209 Bohemians, 52,756 Poles, 45,877 Swedes, 44,615 Norwe- 
gians, 33,785 English, 12,963 French, 11,927 Scotch, 9977 Russians, 9921 
Italians, 9891 Danes, 6989 Canadians, 4912 Dutch, 4827 Huns, 4350 Roumanians, 
2966 Welsh, 2735 Swiss, 121 7 Chinese, 69S Greeks, 682 Belgians, 297 Spaniards, 
T,y West Indians, 34 Portuguese, 31 Sandwich Islanders, and 28 East Indians. 
Truly, a motley company! Some of these, especially the Huns, Poles, Bohe- 
mians, Scandinavians, and Russians, dwell by themselves in distinct sections of 
the city, where scarcely any one of any other nationality lives, and where the 
English language is almost never heard. Each colony forms, practically, a 
foreign city, with its own language, dress, manners and customs, and character- 
istic amusements, all included within this one great American city. 

In length of life the people of Chicago seem to be particularly favored. 
Engineering has made the site a healthful one, and careful municipal adminis- 
tration maintains good sanitary conditions. The annual mortality is only i; T _. 
to the thousand, a lower rate than that of almost any other large city in the 
world. In business energy they brook no rivals. It is their proud claim that 
theirs is the greatest manufacturing city in America, that it contains the largest 
single business house in America, and that it is the greatest railroad centre, and 
the greatest lumber market, grain market, and meat market, in the world. They 
embody and exemplify, pre-eminently, the restless, venturesome, progressive, 
generous spirit that is typical of the American nation, and that has achieved on 
this continent a material, social and intellectual development that is the wonder 
and the glory of the world. They and their city — which may well become, ere 
long, the largest on the continent — may be regarded, therefore, as most truly 
representative of America and Americans, and as most fittingly the hosts of 
that immeasurable ingathering of the peoples of the world, with all their arts 
and industries, which is to commemorate the opening, to those peoples and to 
their ancestors four centuries ago, of this western world and all its transcendent 
potentialities of resource for the physical, intellectual and spiritual welfare of 
mankind. 



CHAPTER XLYI. 

THE GREAT NORTHWEST. 



BY ALBERT SHAW, PH.D., 
Editor "Review of Reviews," formerly editor of " Minneapolis Tribune." 



"Northwest" is a shifting, uncertain designation. The term has been used 
to cover the whole stretch of country from Pittsburg to Puget Sound, north of 
the Ohio River and the thirty-seventh parallel of latitude. Popularly it signified 
the old Northwestern Territory — including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 

Wisconsin — until about the time of the 
Civil War. In the decade following the 
war, Illinois and Iowa were largely in the 
minds of men who spoke of the Northwest. 
From 1S70 to 1880, Iowa, Kansas, North- 
ern Missouri, and Nebraska constituted 
the most stirring and favored region — the 
Northwest par excellence. But the past 
decade has witnessed a remarkable devel- 
opment in the Dakotas ; and Minnesota, 
North and South Dakota, and Montana, 
with Iowa and Nebraska, are perhaps the 
States most familiarly comprised in the idea 
of the Northwest. These States are really 
in the heart of the continent — midway 
between oceans ; and perhaps by common 
consent the term Northwest will, a decade 
hence, have moved on and taken firm 
possession of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, 
and Wyoming, while ultimately Alaska may succeed to the designation. 

But for the present the Northwest is the great arable wedge lying between 
the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, and between the Missouri River and 
the Rocky Mountains. It is a region that is pretty clearly defined upon a map 

7S9 




AIJIF.RT SHAW, PH.D. 



790 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

showing' physical characteristics. For the most part, it is a region of great 
natural fertility, of regular north-temperate climate, of moderate but sufficient 
rainfall, of scant forests and great prairie expanses, and of high average altitude 
without mountains. In a word, it is a region that was adapted by nature to the 
cultivation of the cereals and leading crops of the temperate zone without 
arduous and time-consuming processes for subduing the wilderness and redeem- 
ing the soil. 

This "New Northwest," in civilization and in all its significant character- 
istics, is the creature of the vast impulse that the successful termination of the 
war gave the nation. No other extensive area was ever settled under similar 
conditions. The homestead laws, the new American system of railroad build- 
ing, and the unprecedented demand for staple food products in the industrial 
centres at home and abroad, peopled the prairies as if by magic. Until 1870, 
fixing the date very roughly, transportation facilities followed colonization. The 
railroads were built to serve and stimulate a traffic that already existed. The 
pioneers had done a generation's work before the iron road overtook them. In 
the past two decades all has been changed. The railroads have been the 
pioneers and colonizers. They have invaded the solitary wilderness, and the 
population has followed. Much of the land has belonged to the roads, through 
subsidy grants, but the greater part of the mileage has been laid without the 
encouragement of land subsidies or other bonuses, by railway corporations that 
were willing to look to the future for their reward. 

It would be almost impossible to overestimate the significance of this 
method of colonization. Within a few years it has transformed the buffalo 
ranges into the world's most extensive fields of wheat and corn. A region 
comprising northern and western Minnesota, and the two Dakotas, which con- 
tributed practically' nothing to the country's wheat supply twelve or fifteen 
years ago, has, by this system of railroad colonization, reached an annual 
production of 100,000,000 bushels of wheat alone — about one-fourth of the crop 
of the entire country. In like manner, parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, and 
Kansas, that produced no corn before 1875 or 1880, are now the centre of 
corn-raising, and yield many hundreds of millions of bushels annually. These 
regions enter as totally new factors into the world's supply of foods and raw 
materials. A great area of this new territory might be defined that was 
inhabited in 1870 by less than a million people, in 1880 by more than three 
millions, and in 1890 by from six to seven millions. 

Let us imagine a man from the East who has visited the Northwestern 
states and territories at some time between the years 1870 and 1875, an< ^ wno 
retains a strong impression of what he saw, but who has not been west of 
Chicago since that time, until, in the World's Fair year he determines upon a 
new exploration of Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. 



THE DAIRY AND LIVE-STOCK FARMS OF TO-DAY. 791 

However well informed he had tried to keep himself through written descrip- 
tions and statistical records of Western progress, he would see what nothing 
but the evidence of his own eyes could have made him believe to be possible. 
Iowa in 1870 was already producing a large crop of cereals, and was inhabited 
by a thriving, though very new, farming population. But the aspect of the 
country was bare and uninviting, except in the vicinity of the older com- 
munities on the Mississippi River. As one advanced across the State the farm- 
houses were very small, and looked like isolated dry-goods boxes ; there were 
few well-built barns or farm buildings ; and the struggling young cottonwood 
and soft-maple saplings planted in close groves about the tiny houses were so 
slight an obstruction to the sweep of vision across the open prairie that they only 
seemed to emphasize the monotonous stretches of fertile, but uninteresting, 
plain. Now the landscape is wholly transformed. A railroad ride in June 
through the best parts of Iowa reminds one of a ride through some of the 
pleasantest farming districts of England. The primitive " claim shanties " of 
thirty years ago have given place to commodious farm-houses flanked by great 
barns and hay-ricks, and the well-appointed structures of a prosperous agricul- 
ture. In the rich, deep meadows herds of fine-blooded cattle are grazing. 
What was once a blank, dreary landscape is now garden-like and inviting. The 
poor little saplings of the earlier days, which seemed to be apologizing to the 
robust corn-stalks in the neighboring fields, have grown on that deep soil into 
great, spreading trees. One can easily imagine, as he looks off in every direc- 
tion and notes a wooded horizon, that he is — as in Ohio, Indiana, or Kentucky — 
in a farming region which has been cleared out of primeval forests. There are 
many towns I might mention which twenty-five years ago, with their new, wooden 
shanties scattered over the bare face of the prairie, seemed the hottest place on 
earth as the summer sun beat upon their unshaded streets and roofs, and 
seemed the coldest places on earth when the fierce blizzards of winter swept 
unchecked across the prairie expanses. To-day the density of shade in those 
towns is deemed of positive detriment to health, and for several years past 
there has been a systematic thinning out and trimming up of the great, cluster- 
ing elms. Trees of from six to ten feet in girth are found everywhere by the 
hundreds of thousands. Each farm-house is sheltered from winter winds by its 
own dense groves. Many of the farmers are able from the surplus growth of 
wood upon their estates to provide themselves with a large and regular supply 
of fuel. If I have dwelt at some length upon this picture of the transformation 
of the bleak, grain-producing Iowa prairies of thirty years ago into the dairy and 
live-stock farms of to-day, with their fragrant meadows and ample groves, it is 
because the picture is one which reveals so much as to the nature and meaning 
of Northwestern progress. 

Not a little has been written regarding the rapid destruction of the vast 



792 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

wljite-pine forests with which Nature has covered large districts of Michigan, 
Wisconsin, and Minnesota. It is true that this denudation has progressed at a 
rate with which nothing of a like character in the history of the world is com- 
parable. It is also true, doubtless, that the clearing away of dense forest areas 
has been attended with some inconvenient climatic results, and particularly with 
some objectionable effects upon the even distribution of rainfall and the regu- 
larity of the flow of rivers. But most persons who have been alarmed at the 
rapidity of forest destruction in the white-pine belt have wholly overlooked the 
great compensating facts. It happens that the white-pine region is not espe- 
cially fertile, and that for some time to come it is not likely to acquire a pros- 
perous agriculture. But adjacent to it and beyond it there was a vast region of 
country which, though utterly treeless, was endowed with a marvelous richness 
of soil and with a climate fitted for all the staple productions of the temperate 
zone. This region embraced parts of Illinois, almost the whole of Iowa, South- 
ern Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and parts of 
Montana, — a region of imperial extent. Now, it happens that for every acre 
of pine land that has been denuded in Michigan, Northern Wisconsin, and 
Northern Minnesota there are somewhere in the great treeless region further 
south and west two or three new farm-houses. The railroads, pushing ahead 
of settlement out into the open prairie, have carried the white-pine lumber from 
the gigantic sawmills of the Upper Mississippi and its tributaries ; and thus 
millions of acres of land have been brought under cultivation by farmers who 
could not have been housed in comfort but for the proximity of the pine forests. 
The rapid clearing away of timber areas in Wisconsin has simply meant the 
rapid settlement of North and South Dakota, Western Iowa, and Nebraska. 
And the settlement of these treeless regions means the successful growth on 
every farm of at least several hundred trees. Without attempting to be statis- 
tical or exact, we might say that an acre of Northern Minnesota pine trees 
makes it possible for a farmer in Dakota or Nebraska to have a house, farm 
buildings, and fences, with a holding of at least one hundred and sixty acres 
upon which he will successfully cultivate several acres of forest trees of different 
kinds. Even if the denuded pine lands of the region south and west of Lake 
Superior would not readily produce a second growth of dense forest, — which, it 
should be said in passing, they certainly will, — their loss would be far more than 
made good by the universal cultivation of forest trees in the prairie States. It 
is at least comforting to reflect, when the friends of scientific forestry warn us 
against the ruthless destruction of standing timber, that thus far at least in our 
Western history we have simply been cutting down trees in order to put a roof 
over the head of the man who was invading treeless regions for the purpose of 
planting and nurturing a hundred times as many trees as had been destroyed 
for his benefit ! There is something almost inspiring in the contemplation of 




THE ROYAL GORGE, COLORADO 



794 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

millions of families, all the way from Minnesota to Colorado and Texas, living 
in the shelter of these new pine houses and transforming the plains into a shaded 
and fruitful empire. 

The enormous expansion of our railway systems will soon have made it 
quite impossible for any of the younger generation to realize what hardships 
were attendant upon such limited colonization of treeless prairie regions as pre- 
ceded the iron rails. In 1876 I spent the summer in a part of Dakota to which 
a considerable number of hardy but poor farmers had found their way and taken 
up claims. They could not easily procure wood for houses, no other ordinary 
building material was accessible, and they were living in half-underground 
" dug-outs, " so-called. There was much more pleasure and romance in the 
pioneer experiences of my own ancestors a hundred years ago, who were living 
in comfortable log houses with huge fireplaces, and shooting abundant supplies 
of deer and wild turkey in the deep woods of Southern Ohio. The pluck and 
industry of these Dakota pioneers, most of whom were Irishmen and Norwe- 
gians, won my heartiest sympathy and respect. Poor as they were, they main- 
tained one public institution in common — namely, a school, with its place of 
public assemblage. The building had no floor but the beaten earth, and its 
thick walls were blocks of matted prairie turf, its roof also being of sods sup- 
ported upon some poles brought from the scanty timber-growth along the 
margin of a prairie river. To-day these poor pioneers are enjoying their reward. 
Their valley is traversed by several railroads ; prosperous villages have sprung 
up ; their lands are of considerable value ; they all live in well-built farm- 
houses ; their shade trees have grown to a height of fifty or sixty feet ; a bust- 
ling and ambitious city, with fine churches, opera houses, electric illumination, 
and the most advanced public educational system, is only a few miles away from 
them. Such transformations have occurred, not alone in a few spots in Iowa 
and South Dakota, but are common throughout a region that extends from the 
British dominions to the Indian Territory, and from the Mississippi River to the 
Rocky Mountains, — a region comprising more than a half million square miles. 

Naturally the industrial life of these Northwestern communities is based 
solidly upon agriculture. There is, perhaps, hardly any other agricultural 
region of equal extent upon the face of the earth that is so fertile and so well 
adapted for the production of the most necessary articles of human food. 
During the past decade the world's markets have been notably disturbed and 
affected, and profound social changes and political agitations have occurred in 
various remote parts of the earth. It is within bounds to assert that the most 
potent and far-reaching factor in the altered conditions of the industrial world 
during these recent years, has been the sudden invasion and utilization of this 
great new farming region. Most parts of the world which are fairly prosperous 
do not produce staple food supplies in appreciable surplus quantities. Several 



WHO IS THE WESTERN FARMER.' 795 

regions which are not highly prosperous sell surplus food products out of their 
poverty rather than out of their abundance. That is to say, the people of 
India and the people of Russia have often been obliged, in order to obtain 
money to pay their taxes and other necessary expenses, to sell and send away 
to prosperous England the wheat which they have needed for hungry mouths at 
home. They have managed to subsist upon coarser and cheaper food. But in 
our Northwestern States the application of ingenious machinery to the cultiva- 
tion of fertile and virgin soils has within the past twenty-five years precipitated 
upon the world a stupendous new supply of cereals and of meats, produced in 
quantities enormously greater than the people of the Northwestern States 
could consume. These foodstuffs have powerfully affected agriculture in Ire- 
land, England, France, and Germany, and in fact in every other part of the 
accessible and cultivated globe. 

So much has been written of late about the condition of the farmer in these 
regions that it is pertinent to inquire who the Western farmer is. In the old 
States the representative farmer is a man of long training in the difficult and 
honorable art of diversified agriculture. He knows much of soils, of crops and 
their wise rotation, of domestic animals and their breeding, and of a hundred 
distinct phases of the production, the life, and the household economics that 
belong to the traditions and methods of Anglo-Saxon farming. If he is a wise 
man, owning his land and avoiding extravagance, he can defy any condition of 
the markets, and can survive any known succession of adverse seasons. There 
are also many such farmers in the West. But there are thousands of wheat- 
raisers or corn-growers who have followed in the wake of the railway and taken 
up Government or railroad land,- and who are not yet farmers in the truest 
and best sense of the word. They are unskilled laborers who have become 
speculators. They obtain their land for nothing, or for a price ranging from 
one dollar and fifty cents to five dollars per acre. They borrow on mortgage 
the money to build a small house and to procure horses and implements and 
seed grain. Then they proceed to put as large an acreage as they can manage 
into a single crop — wheat in the Dakotas, wheat or corn in Nebraska and Kan- 
sas. They speculate upon the chances of a favorable season and a good crop 
safely harvested ; and they speculate upon the chances of a profitable market. 
They hope that the first two crops may render them the possessor of an unin- 
cumbered estate, supplied with modest buildings, and with a reasonable quan- 
tity of machinery and live stock. Sometimes they succeed beyond their antici- 
pations. In many instances the chances go against them. They live on land, 
and the title is invested in them ; but they are using borrowed capital, use it 
unskillfully, meet an adverse season or two, lose through foreclosure that which 
has cost them nothing except a year or two of energy spent in what is more 
nearly akin to gambling than to farming, and finally help to swell the great 



796 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

chorus that calls the world to witness the distress of Western agriculture. It 
cannot be said too emphatically that real agriculture in the West is safe and 
prosperous, and that the unfortunates are the inexperienced persons, usually 
without capital, who attempt to raise a single crop on new land. For many of 
them it would be about as wise to take borrowed money and speculate in wheat 
in the Chicago bucket-shops. 

The great majority, however, of these inexperienced and capital-less wheat 
and corn producers gradually become farmers. It is inevitable, at first, that a 
country opened by the railroads for the express purpose of obtaining the largest 
possible freightage of cereals should for a few seasons be a "single-crop coun- 
try." Often the seed-grain is supplied on loan by the roads themselves. They 
charge " what the traffic will bear." The grain is all, or nearly all, marketed 
through long series of elevators following the tracks, at intervals of a few miles, 
and owned by some central company that bears a close relation to the railroad. 
Thus the corporations which control the transportation and handling ot the grain 
in effect maintain for their own advantage an exploitation of the entire regions 
that they traverse, through the first years of settlement. Year by year the 
margin of cultivation extends further West, and the single-crop sort of farming 
tends to recede. The wheat growers produce more barley and oats and flax, 
try corn successfully, introduce live stock and dairying, and thus begin to 
emerge as real farmers. 

Unless this method of Western settlement is comprehended, it is not pos- 
sible to understand the old Granger movement and the more recent legislative 
conflicts between the farmers of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, and the 
Dak'otas, on the one hand, and the great transportation and grain-handling cor- 
porations on the other. It was fundamentally a question of the division of 
profits. The railroads had "made" the country : were they entitled to allow 
the farmers simply a return about equal to the cost of production, keeping for 
themselves the difference between the cost and the price in the central markets, 
or were they to base their charges upon the cost of their service, and leave the 
farmers to enjoy whatever profits might arise from the production of wheat or 
corn ? Out of that protracted contest has been developed the principle of the 
public regulation of rates. The position of these communities of farmers with 
interests so similar, forming commonwealths so singularly homogeneous, has 
led to a reliance upon State aid that is altogether unprecedented in new and 
sparsely settled regions, where individualism has usually been dominant, and 
governmental activity relatively inferior. 

But agriculture, while the basis of Northwestern wealth, is not the sole 
pursuit. Transportation has become in these regions a powerful interest, 
because of the vast surplus agricultural product to be carried away, and of the 
great quantities of lumber, coal, salt, and staple supplies in general, to be dis- 



' , '^rF^REwrp; '■" j f\Y ' \i ■-*'■'"■■ 




798 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

tributed throughout the new prairie communities. The transformation of the 
pine forests into the homes of several million people has, of course, developed 
marvelous sawmill and building industries ; and the furnishing of millions of 
new homes has called into being great factories for the making of wooden 
furniture, iron stoves, and all kinds of household supplies. In response to the 
demand for agricultural implements and machinery with which to cultivate five 
hundred million acres of newly utilized wild land, there have come into exist- 
ence numerous great establishments for the. making of machines that have been 
especially invented to meet the peculiarities and exigencies of Western farm 
life. 

Through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, Indian corn has become a 
greater product in quantity and value than wheat ; while in Wisconsin, Minne- 
sota, and North and South Dakota the wheat is decidedly the preponderant 
crop. Although in addition to oats and barley, which flourish in all the Western 
States, it has been found possible to increase the acreage of maize in the north- 
ern tier, it is now believed that the most profitable alternate crop in the latitude 
of Minneapolis and St. Paul is to be flax. Already a region including parts of 
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas has become the most 
extensive area of flax culture in the whole world. The crop has been produced 
simply for the seed, which has supplied large linseed oil factories in Minneapolis, 
Chicago, and various Western places. But now it has been discovered that the 
flax straw, which has heretofore been allowed to rot in the fields as a valueless 
product, can be utilized for a fibre which will make a satisfactory quality of 
coarse linen fabrics. Linen mills have been established in Minneapolis, and it 
is somewhat confidently predicted that in course of time the linen industry of 
that ambitious city will reach proportions even greater than its wonderful flour 
industry, which for a number of years has been without a rival anywhere in the 
world. 

The railroad system of the Northwest has been developed in such a way 
that no one centre may be fairly regarded as the commercial capital of the 
region. Chicago, with its marvelous foresight, has thrown out lines of travel 
that draw to itself much of the traffic which would seem normally to belong to 
Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth on the north, or to St. Louis and Kansas 
City on the south. But in the region now under discussion, the famous " twin 
cities," Minneapolis and St. Paul, constitute unquestionably the greatest and 
most distinctive centre, both of business and of civilization. They are beauti- 
fully situated, and they add to a long list of natural advantages very many 
equally desirable attractions growing out of the enterprising and ambitious fore- 
thought of the inhabitants. They are cities of beautiful homes, pleasant parks, 
enterprising municipal improvements, advanced educational establishments, and 
varied industrial interests. Each is a distinct urban communitv, although thev 



RADICALISM AND THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT. 






lie so near together that they constitute one general centre of commerce and 
transportation when viewed from a distance. Their stimulating rivalry has had 
the effect to keep each city alert and to prevent a listless, degenerate local 
administration. About the Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis, great manu- 
facturing establishments are grouping themselves, and each year adds to the 
certainty that these two picturesque and charming cities have before them a 
most brilliant civic future. 

The tendency to rely upon united public action is illustrated in the growth 




PASS IN THE MOUNTAINS 



of Northwestern educational systems. The universities of these common- 
wealths are State universities. Professional education is under the State 
auspices and control. The normal schools and the agricultural schools belong 
to the State. The public high school provides intermediate instruction. The 
common district school, supported jointly by local taxation and State subven- 
tion, gives elementary education to the children of all classes. As the towns 
grow the tendency to graft manual and technical courses upon the ordinary 
public school curriculum is unmistakably strong. The Northwest, more than 



Soo THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

any other part of the country, is disposed to make every kind of education a 
public function. 

Radicalism has flourished in the homogeneous agricultural society of the 
Northwest. In the anti-monopoly conflict there seemed to have survived some 
of the intensity of feeling that characterized the anti-slavery movement ; and a 
tinge of this fanatical quality has always been apparent in the Western and 
Northwestern monetary heresies. But it is in the temperance movement that 
this sweep of radical impulse has been most irresistible. It was natural that 
the movement should become political and take the form of an agitation for 
prohibition. The history of prohibition in Iowa, Kansas, and the Dakotas, and 
of temperance legislation in Minnesota and Nebraska, reveals — even better 
perhaps than the history of the anti-monopoly movement — the radicalism, 
homogeneity, and powerful socializing tendencies of the Northwestern people. 
Between these different agitations there has been in reality no slight degree of 
relationship ; at least their origin is to be traced to the same general conditions 
of society. 

The extent to which a modern community resorts to state action depends 
in no small measure upon the accumulation of private resources. Public or 
organized initiative will be relatively strongest where the impulse to progress is 
positive but the ability of individuals is small. There are few rich men in the 
Northwest. Iowa, great as is the Hawkeye State, has no large city and no large 
fortunes. Of Kansas the same thing may be said. The Dakotas have no rich 
men and no cities. Minnesota has Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Nebraska 
has Omaha ; but otherwise these two States are farming communities, without 
large cities or concentrated private capital. Accordingly the recourse to public 
action is comparatively easy. South Dakota farmers desire to guard against 
drought by opening artesian wells for irrigation. They resort to State legisla- 
tion and the sale of county bonds. North Dakota wheat growers are unfortu- 
nate in the failure of crops. They secure seed-wheat through State action and 
their county governments. A similarity of condition fosters associated action, 
and facilitates the progress of popular movements. 

In such a society the spirit of action is intense. If there are few philoso- 
phers, there is remarkable diffusion of popular knowledge and ocl ivantary 
education. The dry atmosphere and the cold winters are nerve-stimulants, and 
life seems to have a higher tension and velocity than in other parts of the 
country. 

The Northwest presents a series of very interesting race problems. The 
first one, chronologically at least, is the problem that the American Indian pre- 
sents. It is not so long ago since the Indian was in possession of a very large 
portion of the region we are now considering. A number of tribes were gradu- 
ally removed further West, or were assigned to districts in the Indian Territory. 



THE LARGE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT OF POPULATION. 



Soi 



But most of them were concentrated in large reservations in Minnesota, 
Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. The past few 
years have witnessed the rapid reduction of these reservations, and the adoption 
of a policy which, if carried to its logical conclusion with energy and good faith, 
will at an early date result in the universal education of the children, in the 
abolition of the system of reservations, and in the settlement of the Indian 
families upon farms of their own, as fully enfranchised American citizens. 

The most potent single element of population in the Northwest is of New 
England origin, although more than half of it has found its way into Iowa, 
Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, by filtration through the inter- 




iSS S . 



mediate States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and 
Illinois. But there has also been a vast direct immigration from abroad ; and 
this element has come more largely, by far, from the northern than from the 
central and southern races of Europe. The Scandinavian peninsula and the 
countries about the Baltic and North Seas have supplied the Northwest with a 
population that already numbers millions. From Chicago to Montana there is 
now a population of full Scandinavian origin, which, perhaps, may be regarded 
as about equal in numbers to the population that remains in Sweden and Nor- 
way. In Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, as well as 
in Northern Iowa and in some parts of Nebraska, there are whole counties 
where the population is almost entirely Scandinavian. Upon all this portion of 
5' 



8o2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the country for centuries to come the Scandinavian patronymics will be as firmly 
fixed as they have been upon the Scotch and English coasts, where the North- 
men entrenched themselves so numerously and firmly about nine hundred or a 
thousand years ago. The Scandinavians in the Northwest become Americans 
with a rapidity unequaled by any other non-English-speaking element. Their 
political ambition is as insatiate as that of the Irish, and they already secure 
offices in numbers far beyond the proportion to which their qualifications would 
entitle them ; for the great majority now come from the lowest classes of 
unskilled labor in Sweden and Norway, rather than from the ranks of the pro- 
fessional classes, the substantial farmers, and the skilled mechanics. But their 
devotion to the American school system, their political aptitude and ambition, 
and their enthusiastic pride in American citizenship are thoroughly hopeful 
traits, and it is generally believed that they will contribute much of strength 
and sturdiness to the splendid race of Northwestern Americans that is to be 
developed in the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Valleys. The Northwestern 
Germans evince a tendency to mass in towns, as in Milwaukee, and to preserve 
intact their language and national traits. 

The large towns of the Northwest are notable for the great numbers of the 
brightest and most energetic of the young business and professional men of 
the East that they contain. While they lack the leisure class and the traditions 
of culture that belong to older communities, they may justly claim a far higher 
percentage of college-bred men and of families of cultivated tastes than belong 
to Eastern towns of like population. The intense pressure of business and 
absorption of private pursuits are, for the present, seeming obstacles to the 
progress of Western communities in the highest things ; but already the zeal 
for public improvements and for social progress in all that pertains to true 
culture is very great. Two decades hence no man will question the quality of 
Northwestern civilization. If the East is losing something of its distinctive 
Americanism through the influx of foreign elements and the decay of its old- 
time farming communities, the growth of the Northwest, largely upon the basis 
of New England blood and New England ideas, will make full compensation. 

Every nation of the world confronts its own racial or climatic or industrial 
problems, and nowhere is there to be found an ideal state of happiness or virtue 
or prosperity; but all things considered it may well be doubted whether there 
exists any other extensive portion, either of America or of the world, in which 
there is so little of pauperism, of crime, of social inequality, of ignorance, and 
of chafing discontent, as in the agricultural Northwest that lies between Chicago 
and the Rocky Mountains. Schools and churches are almost everywhere flour- 
ishing in this region, and the necessities of life are not beyond the reach of any 
element or class. There is a pleasantness, a hospitality, and a friendliness in 
the social life of the Western communities that is certainly not surpassed. 



CHAPTER XLVII. 

THE OLD SOUTH AND THE NEW SOI 



z 



BY HON. WM. C. 1'. BRECKINRIDGE, 

Member of Congress J rom Kentucky. 



It is nearly impossible to give an accurate idea of the settlement, develop- 
ment, civilizations, and customs of the several States which compose the section 
generally known as " the South " within the limits of a single chapter, and to do it 
satisfactorily at all. The institution of slavery so compacted those States as to, 
not unnaturally, make them, in the mind of the ordinary observer, be considered 

as if they were homogeneous, with the 
same civilization and customs. The late 
war intensified this general belief, so that 
to-day the general description," the South," 
is more a word of institutional definition 
than of either a geographical or industrial 
section. 

Few greater men have spoken the 
English language than Sir Walter Raleigh, 
and his conception of the mode and results 
of the colonization of America was more 
nearly like unto what has actually come to 
pass than that of any other Englishman. 
It was through him and his efforts that the 
settlement at Jamestown was made, after 
the unsuccessful efforts at colonization 
lower down on the Southern coast. 

The discovery of tobacco and of its 
use, and the climate of Virginia and the territory south of it, made the importa- 
tion of the nineteen slaves in the Dutch slave trader in 1619 acceptable ; and, as 
at that period slavery was universal, there was no moral scruple in the preserva- 
tion and growth of African slavery. The pVofitable growth of rice and indigo 
in the low coast lands of Georgia increased the demand for African slaves, who 

So; 




HON. WM. C. P. BRECKINRIDGE. 



So 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

could, with safety, labor in that climate. The subsequent invention of the cotton 
gin added many-fold to the value of slave labor, and spread the institution 
rapidly over the entire section of the South in which the climate permitted 
cotton to be profitably grown. So that the growth and development of the 
colonies which settled in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia were 
accompanied with the increase both of the number and value of slaves. 

A precisely opposite development was going on in that section of the 
country where agriculture was purely the husbandry of farm products and the 
growth of live stock. In such labors the slave was not of any advantage. He 
was never equal as a laborer to his white competitor, nor did he stand the 
climate of those States so well ; but where the necessity was to have disciplined 
labor in gangs, under a hot sun, and when to that was added the danger of 
malarial fevers from swamp lands, his labor became much more valuable. 
These differences in climate and product, and this marked diversity of labor, 
naturally produced entirely different industries and caused many dissimilarities 
in the development of the social civilization and of the customs of the people. 
It is quite difficult for one who was not either raised, or did not for a long period 
live, in one of the Southern States to appreciate how the institution of slavery 
was interwoven with all its civilization, its customs, its labors, its profits, and its 
difficulties. All social problems, as well as all social customs, became modified 
by this institution and by the products to which its use required the people to 
devote their entire attention and capital. 

Only a superficial observer would not notice the very great difference 
between the institution of slavery in the farming States and in the planting 
States of the South. In Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, the mountainous and 
grass sections of Tennessee, the mountainous and grass section of North 
Carolina, Georgia, and in the State of Missouri, slavery was only a domestic 
institution. Comparatively few slaves were owned by the richest men. They 
lived in daily association with the families of their owners. The white children 
of the master and the colored children of the slave played together upon terms 
of semi-equality until the school age was reached, and the kindliness thus pro- 
duced, and the association incidental to such a life, continued through the lives 
of both. 

In the planting States large gangs of negroes lived in what were called 
"quarters" under the control and supervision of an overseer, and without 
scarcely any association with the families of the masters at the main house, with 
the exception, however, of the domestic slaves, who performed the ordinary 
services of the household, between whom and the field hands was a gap almost 
as great as between the families of the master and the domestic slave. This 
difference had results which were far reaching and not always clearly understood. 

There were also ethnological differences between the slaves of the border 



EARLY SETTLEMENT. 805 

slave States and the majority of the slaves of the cotton and sugar States. 
Very few, if any, slaves were in those border States who were imported to 
America after the Revolutionary War ; while the great bulk of the cotton States 
slaves were imported after the treaty of peace in which was recognized the 
independence of the United Colonies ; these were ethnologically of a different 
type from those which had been brought over and sold through Virginia and 
Maryland and had been sent from Virginia and Maryland to the interior States ; 
and this ethnological difference is easily observable to-day. 

While the early settlements on the southern coast were made early in the 
seventeenth century, yet they grew quite slowly, and when the Revolutionary 
War came it was only the thin fringe along the Atlantic Coast and east of the 
Blue Ridge which was populated, with the exception of some of the valleys 
which ran in between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. Beyond the Alle- 
ghenies there were no settlements at all. The climate and the soil tempted the 
people to agricultural pursuits ; and the institution of slavery is necessarily 
agricultural. The unoccupied lands were so large in extent, and so fertile in 
quality that there was no temptation to put labor or capital into any other pur- 
suit ; and the profits of farming and planting with slave labor were so great that 
the returns induced every one to take every possible risk in making new invest- 
ments. 

The acquisition of Louisiana under the administration of Mr. Jefferson, 
giving the free navigation of the Mississippi River and good titles and perfect 
security to those who chose to settle in the Mississippi Valley, caused the 
development of the inexhaustible soil of that great valley ; and until the late 
war there was no temptation for a Southern capitalist, or an earnest and active 
young Southerner looking toward a fortune in his old age, to embark in any 
other pursuit than the planting of cotton or the raising of sugar, and such com- 
mercial vocations as these great industries might require. But the profits in 
the farming portion of the Southern States were sufficiently great, and unoccu- 
pied lands sufficiently large to give ample opportunity for all the capital and 
energy at the disposal of the citizens of those States ; while those who desired 
to migrate from them found abundant promise of wealth in the cheap and rich 
lands of the prairie States of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and further to the 
Northwest. This climate, these pursuits and this institution, necessarily modi- 
fied the development of social life and of social civilization. 

The life of a Virginia planter, or a Kentucky or Tennessee farmer, was, 
while in many respects a pleasant and easy life, one of labor. It was free from 
the ordinary risks of the manufacturer and merchant. Bankruptcy was very rare ; 
great wealth equally rare ; but moderate, comfortable, and abundant livelihood 
was common. This produced a corresponding life, which was simple in its 
manners, unostentatious in its customs, not very careful in its economies ; frank, 



8o6 



THE STORY OF AMERICA. 



virtuous, and honest in its relations to neighbors and other persons, and full of a 
generosity founded rather on free living than systematic charity. The life was 
almost entirely a family life as contradistinguished from a community life. 
Families resided on their own farms, and, to a certain degree, isolated from 
their neighbors, and from this grew a certain intensity of family affection and 
of family pride which gave to the members of the family the aid and defence 
of all the clan, which resembled the Scotch clannishness. Large enterprises 
requiring co-operative effort were nearly impossible. Whatever one man or 
family could do was always excellently well done ; but those efforts which 
required cooperative action were apt to fall through. Such a life is apt to pro- 




mi KING IN GEO 



duce marked individuality — each person has been developed so as to intensify 
his individual qualities ; and yet, like all communities, the influences upon each 
being somewhat similar, the peculiarities of all its members resembled those of 
all the other members. 

An old-fashioned Southern farm and farmers presented a type of domes- 
ticity which will pass entirely away with this generation, and which was one of 
the sweetest, purest, and most productive types of social life ever known. The 
master and owner was head of the family in a sense which has never been 
known in modern society, and which bore a resemblance to the head of a tribe 
in the nomadic life, typified by the life of Abraham. The power which he had 



SLAVERY AND AGRICULTURE. S07 

over his slaves, and the isolation which his family suffered from the very insti- 
tution itself, gave to him an influence over his wife and children which, in fact, 
as well as in name, constituted him the head of the family ; and yet there has 
never been a home in which the wife was so important and so dominant, for 
there cannot be a home in which the domestic part was so important. Upon 
her fell the duty of supervising the household, its occupants, and its affairs, of 
superintending the conduct and care of the negro women and children. She 
was mistress in the true sense of that word, for in her domain her word was 
the law of the house and of the "quarters." This produced a simple order of 
thought which was curiously characteristic of those people. 

In these households the Bible was the ordinary text-book. Family worship 
was conducted regularly, and without regard to the personal piety of the head 
of the family. It was one of the inherited customs to be kept up and made a 
part of the daily life of the house. The children had no menial duties to per- 
form ; but were raised with a certain dislike and contempt for menial labor, 
because it was performed by slaves and performed for them. This freedom 
from this form of duty was not, however, followed by freedom from labor or 
occupation. In every such household the children were kept occupied con- 
stantly, and were trained from their earliest childhood in such labors and accom- 
plishments as were common to the country, and were supposed to be needed in 
those who were to be the masters and mistresses of such establishments. The 
boys became superb horsemen, excellent shots, skillful sportsmen, and admira- 
ble farmers from their boyhood. They were trained in the open air, so as to 
bear fatigue, to be capable of great endurance, and to be fit to become the 
masters and owners of large farms. While they might or might not work with 
their hands in the actual labor of the farm, they were taught how it ought to be 
done, so as to take, at a very early age, the care of a farm. 

The same training was given to the girls for the same purpose. They 
early became notable housewives ; they were personally made expert with the 
needle ; they became splendid horsewomen ; and, if a habit of command soon 
appeared, it was sweetened and softened by the constant supervision of the sick 
and care for the aged. 

In a society where slavery is confined to those of a different race from that 
of the master, race, not condition, becomes the condition of society. All who 
are white are equals in such a community in a sense which is never true else- 
where : for every white man is free and may become the owner of slaves, and 
whatever ranks may exist they are purely temporary and based largely on 
merit. In that community no white person is barred from ready entrance into 
any rank, even the highest, when he demonstrates his right based upon his 
merits. No part of the country has had so many eminent citizens springing 
from the humblest walks of life, and no demonstrations of confidence and affec- 



8o8 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

tion have been greater or more touching than those shown by those people ,to 
men of humblest birth. This is not generally believed or understood ; but it is 
true, and to an extent that aids us to understand how the slaveholding white 
population always had as their friends and allies the non-slaveholding white 
population of those States, and it is true to-day as it was before the war, and 
will continue to be true in those sections of the South where the colored people 
are at all equal in number to the white population. 

The profits in such farming as was common in the border States was not 
large in ready money, after the abundant and somewhat wasteful support of the 
family and farm had been taken out of the year's products. The money resi- 
duum was not large, and so accumulated capital was never great. This pre- 
vented any great public works of any kind, either in the shape of great public 
buildings, universities, railroads, or other enterprises. It also prevented marked 
inequalities in the pecuniary conditions of men. There were none very rich, 
few very poor, the vast mass being in comfortable circumstances. This also 
opened but few avenues for profit and distinction to the young men, the learned 
professions and such business as was necessary in such a simple community 
were the only vocations to those who desired to leave the farm. The best talent, 
therefore, went into the learned professions or remained in the pursuit of agricul- 
ture. Skillful lawyers and doctors, eloquent preachers, and trained statesmen 
were naturally produced in a community where these were the most profitable and 
influential vocations. The leisurely life in such a community gave opportunity 
for culture, for wide reading, and, perhaps, for the development of the subtleties 
of politics and philosophy, rather than for the practical pursuits of life ; and so 
this section produced statesmen of unsurpassed attainments in the science of 
politics and in the realm of constitutional and international history. 

As cities are the growth of commerce and manufactures, there could not 
be great cities in this section ; but as wealth and leisure was considerable, and 
as the cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco crops had to be exported and sold where 
they were not raised, commercial cities of a fair size would necessarily grow up. 
These cities, however, would have no other business than that incident to these 
general products, and would necessarily reveal, in the mode of business and in 
the type of life, the peculiarities which such pursuits would produce. Quiet, 
easy, leisurely, comfortable, intelligent, honest, agreeable, beautiful — such would 
be the words that would a priori be apt to describe cities in such a climate and 
produced by such causes, and Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, Richmond, 
Nashville, Louisville come within the descriptions in which such terms can be 
fairly used. The smoke of industries, the bustle and confusion of a very active 
commerce, the rush and hurry of excited men, the cruel panics of sudden fluctu- 
ations in markets, the appearance of the new rich, and the disappearance of 
well-known houses going down in a storm, would not mark the life of such 



POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT. 



809 



cities. New York and Charleston are pictures as well as products, and in their 
features testify to the conditions which produce them. 

The settlements of the South were from different nationalities and of 



different creeds. The Ger 
under Oglethorpe, the Hu- 
delicious flavor to South 
settled the valley of Virginia 
lina, the "Pennsylvania 
stone, with its rich soil, from 
Virginia, Tennessee, and 
marked a people, with as 
who are sometimes called 
tidewater of Virginia, or the 
England ; and those char- 
To one who is familiar with 
settlements the peculiarities 
small as counties like the 
ginia, can be easily rec 
Yet they were the min 




mans, who came to Georgia 
guenots, who gave a certain 
Carolina, the Scotch Irish, who 
and large parts of North Caro- 
Dutch," who followed the lime- 
Pennsylvania down through 
North Carolina, were each as 
marked characteristics, as those 
the cavaliers, who settled the 
Puritans, who civilized New 
acteristics survive to this day. 
the earliest history of these 
of certain sections, often as 
County of Rockbridge, in Yir- 

ognized and understood. 

ute characteristics which 



THE MONUMENT OF HENRY W. GRADY. 

distinguished cousins german of the same people ; for the people of the South 
grew more and more alike as time went on ; and it is not too much to say 
were the most homogeneous of any part of the country. 

The political development from the Revolutionary war to i860 can only be 



8io THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

explained under a full understanding of the influence of slavery. From 1783 
to 1 801 the free navigation of the Mississippi River was the necessity of all the 
Southwest, of all that population who resided upon the waters which ran to the 
South and West. From the discovery of the cotton-gin, which made slave 
labor so valuable, to 1S60, it became necessary to put every possible barrier to 
protect the institution of slavery from destruction. Its labor being worthless in 
the Northern States, it was easily perceived that the conflict would arise and' 
that antagonistic legislation could be prevented only by such defensive 
measures as would give to the Southern States power in the National Congress 
sufficient to prevent unfriendly legislation. This accounts for the intense desire 
of the South to secure the annexation of contiguous territory and its desire to 
annex territory anywhere ; for so long as there were large areas of unoccupied 
lands, the restless of the North could find wealth in those countries, and so 
long as any of these territories were contiguous to the Southern States, they 
might hope that, as a non-slaveholding State was admitted into the Federal 
Union, a slaveholding State might also be admitted, and thus preserve the 
equilibrium of power. This long contest solidified the South, gave it a suc- 
cession of trained leaders, made it intense, caused it to study deeply and 
closely constitutional, political, and economical questions, and from it grew that 
compactness which gradually formed it into one body and caused it to be named 
"the South." This was of slow growth. In the early days of the Republic it 
was not particularly inquired whether Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson, 
and Madison, and the younger Adams lived on this or the other side of the 
sectional line ; and when Clay and Jackson competed, no one thought it was of 
special importance that they lived in adjoining States, each a slaveholding 
State. In the great presidential race between Clay and Polk, the fact that each 
was a Southern man added little or nothing to their vote, and subtracted but 
little from their power. 

But while this is true, there were three distinct Souths contained within the 
boundary of those States, and this is now being rapidly developed since the 
institution of slavery was destroyed. The farming South, the planting South, 
the mountainous South, constitute three separate sections, not clearly separated 
by marked boundaries, not so divided that one can say with certainty exactly 
where the lines should run, but yet so distinct as to be substantially capable 
of identification. The destruction of slavery put an end to the invest- 
ment of the profit of Southern labor in the slaves. Some other vocation 
than agriculture had to be found for the active, vigorous, and energetic. 
Twenty years or more was needed to place the States of the South in a condi- 
tion somewhat like that in which they were when the war broke out. The rav- 
ages, injuries, and destruction caused by the war, and the years which followed, 
were so enormous that they have not yet been entirely repaired. Mississippi 



THREE DISTINCT SOUTHS. 



Si i 



in 1S00 was the third wealthiest Statu in the Union, per capita ; it will be many 
years before she will be enabled to resume that place. This changed condition 
has produced its natural results. The great Appalachian range, with the bosom 
of the mountains covered with timber, and inexhaustible minerals buried in the 
soil, with quite a number of large streams, and an equable and pleasant climate, 
has been the fruitful field of new development. That intelligence, energy, and 




EARTHQUAKE AT CHARLESTON, - C. 
Court Sheet Looking We t Police Headquarters on the Left.) 



capital which formerly opened new plantations in the Mississippi Valley, or in 
Texas, have latterly been, in the main, devoted to opening new mines, erecting 
new furnaces, building factories, either within this range or close to its foothills. 
A large amount of capital has been invested in these enterprises, which was 
not the product of the South ; but has been sent there or carried there by men 
from the North or from abroad. This development has gone on and is going 
on to an extent which is scarcely realized ; yet it does not cripple but aids in 
the development ot the agricultural resources of the South. In 1S78, the entire 



8 12 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

assessable value of the property of the South had fallen to almost two billions 
of dollars. Since then there has been added to that taxable value over two 
thousand billions of dollars ; that is, in thirteen years the actual assessable 
value of the Southern States has been doubled ; and this is the natural result 
of the changed condition of affairs. It is a study which would be of interest, to 
see how this development has revealed the climatic and industrial resources of 
that country, and how it is gradually changing the character of its cities. 
Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Roanoke are only possible in communities 
where capital, energy, and brains are devoted to the development of its mineral 
resources. They would have been impossible in an era when the cultivation 
of the soil was the sole or even the main industry. They mark the changed 
relations and altered conditions which the destruction of slavery necessarily 
produced. The late census reveals in another form that this subtle but power- 
ful influence is at work in the drift of people from the country to the towns and 
cities, in the difference between the profit of agricultural and industrial pursuits, 
and in the growth of population in those portions of the States where mineral 
and other factories are possible. 

But this does not state the whole case. The emancipation of the negro 
did neither deport nor change him. He, as negro, still remains in the South. 
The problem of his relation is as unsolved to-day as it was thirty years ago. 
The shadow of that problem is over large portions of that country. Seven 
millions of them are scattered through those States in various proportions 
to the white population, in some sections as one is to seven, in others 
as two is to three, in others as four is to three, and the proportion 
of blacks to whites is greater where the blacks are the least intelligent ; 
and the problem, therefore, becomes more serious. In Virginia, Kentucky, 
Missouri, and Tennessee, where the whites greatly outnumber the blacks, the 
blacks are the most intelligent of their race. In South Carolina, Alabama, 
Mississippi, and Arkansas, where there is almost an equality of numbers 
between the races, the blacks are largely the most inferior and unintelligent of 
their race. And, in the main, it may be said, that the greatest development has 
been where the blacks are least numerous and their labor least important. 
This may not be the case as to the growth of the cotton crop, but certainly it is 
as to every other form of industrial growth ; and the census demonstrates that 
the drift of the colored people is to those sections where they are the most 
numerous and least intelligent. 

After the inauguration of Mr. Hayes, and the withdrawal of troops from 
the South, and the restoration of the autonomy of the State governments 
became complete, it was universally recognized that no community could per- 
manently remain ignorant without becoming impoverished ; that whatever 



DEVELOPMENT OF NEW INDUSTRIES. 



<i3 



other aids might be found, th 
was a necessity ; and, in p 
South, with the burdens o 
the embarrassing- problems 
vexatious questions which 
raised by volun- 
tary taxation for 
the purposes of 
education have 
been surpassing- 
ly generous. The 
difficulties of a / 
common - school 
education in 



ucation of both races 
the wealth of the 
had to carry, and 
:o solve, and the 
ver, the amount 




tyfUi I u V±£ 
MAUI OF BENJAMIN HARVEY HILL. 



those States are very great and exceedingly hard to overcome. The develop- 



8 1 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

ment of such a system must be very slow ; but it has been, in the main, satis- 
factory, and is to-day in every part of the South in a condition of hopeful 
growth ; and as the people grow richer, the system will be more generously 
supported, higher education will receive its proper encouragement, and what- 
ever can be accomplished through this will be done. 

It will readily be observed that as time goes on and these various industrial 
developments continue, one of the results will be the dissolution of the 
South as a compact body. When the clanger from the problem of the diverse 
races, from Federal legislation or other exterior causes, has passed away, when 
a new generation to whom the acts and events of the past thirty years are his- 
tory, in which events they did not act, and which has for them only the same 
general interest that the deeds of our fathers in the Revolution have for us, 
when the waterways leading to the Gulf, and the harbors of the Southern coast 
are so improved and deepened as to furnish the easy means of transportation 
of the products of the country which they water, and as new and larger enter- 
prises are developed on the eastern coast as well as on the borders of the 
Southwestern States, it will be found that the solidarity of the South will pass 
away. There is no more reason why Louisville should stand in any different 
relation to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, than that Cincinnati, St. 
Louis, or Chicago should ; no cause why Maryland, Delaware, and West Vir- 
ginia should vote with Louisiana and Mississippi, than that they should vote 
with other States. 

The causes now at work, and which will work with accelerated speed and 
force, may put Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Ten- 
nessee, and Missouri into relations which they do not now occupy, and such 
other States which now seem to be adverse, as Kansas and Arkansas, into the 
most intimate and close relations. 

These causes will also destroy that peculiar social life which was character- 
istic of many portions of the South before the War. The old Virginia, Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, home farm-life will be a thing of the past ; 
the domestic plantation life of the further South will become only a memory. 
But the Old South will be the New South, simply devoting itself, under changed 
conditions, to new vocations ; and will, in those new vocations, find occupation 
for the same qualities which made the former pursuits profitable. The same 
qualities will be necessary in these new pursuits. He who formerly was the 
leading lawyer of a Southern community by virtue of his courage, industry, 
skill, and intelligence, will be, by virtue of the same qualities, the head of the 
largest industrial enterprises ; while he who was the chief on the floor of a de- 
liberative body will, by virtue of masterhood, be the great banker of his com- 
munity. The modes of life will be altered ; but the substance and character 
will remain the same. 



BREAKING OF THE SOLID SOUTH. 815 

The waterway system of the South, if it can once be put into proper con- 
dition, would work a change that cannot be well estimated. The Mississippi 
River and its tributaries furnish the cheapest transportation for the largest 
number of miles through the richest country at present known ; but the incapac- 
ity to control it stands in the way of that stable and certain domination which 
is a prime necessity of prosperous commerce. If the problem of its control is 
once fully solved and it kept within its bounds, and its navigation and that of its 
tributaries made certain and profitable,' there would be the commencement of a 
revolution in the transportation of the products of the Mississippi Valley, the 
effect of which on the cities on the lakes and the eastern seaboard no one can 
foretell. During the last twenty years, the railroads have been built, controlled, 
and managed by those whose interest it was to transport these products to the 
East. The freights, insurance, and commissions for handling them, have built 
up eastern cities. The natural outlet for these products is the Gulf of Mexico. 
Similar observations somewhat less important and less wide in their scope, can 
be made concerning the result of securing proper depth of water in the harbors 
of Mobile, Savannah, Charleston, and Galveston. These results would change 
the typical southern city ; the quiet and pleasant life in a beautiful southern city 
like Savannah, with its live oak trees, its wide streets, and its elegant hospi- 
tality, the results of its beautiful climate and of its being in an eddy in the 
current of the world's commerce, would pass away, and a new rush and bustle 
would supplant its present ease. What effect all this would have in the gradual 
transformation of a solely agricultural people to a community where agriculture 
is equaled by commerce and manufactures no one can foresee. But there 
would still remain the ineradicable prepotency of heredity. Those cities would 
retain so much of their present individuality as to remain unique. And in this 
sense "the South" will retain those peculiarities which will always characterize 
and distinguish it. As the years go by the American people will become more 
and more homogeneous ; that is, less and less like their European progenitors 
and brothers. They will become more and more Americans ; but each particu- 
lar section will still retain its peculiarities ; and it is one of the interesting studies 
of the development of free institutions to see how these peculiarities are pre- 
served, and how they assist in the development of the common country. We 
will grow to love and trust each other the more as we appreciate and better 
understand the substantial unity of the American character, and the minute but 
marked peculiarities produced by climatic and other causes. 



CHAPTER XLVIII. 

WOMAN IN AMERICA. 



BY FRANCES E. W1LLARD. 

President of the IVorld's »'. C. T. U. 



Any book on American history would be incomplete without a chapter on the 
part women have taken in the upbuilding of the country, and the place they have 
occupied in our American life and institutions. I have therefore accepted the 
invitation of Mr. Mabie to write this chapter for the memorial story of America. 

There were two distinct early types 
of women, the Northern and the Southern. 
Both were patrician in their purity of ethical 
quality, but the latter more technically so 
in its environment. Individuality developed 
earlier in the North, because personal 
initiative was necessary, owing to financial 
needs. The Southern woman had a downier 
nest, and found it so soft and warm that 
she rested more than she worked. Her 
features were less distinctive than those 
of her Northern sister, but more soft ; her 
tones were deeper and more mellow, but 
had less of the clarion timbre of conscious 
power. The line of grace was more pro- 
nounced in the figure and movement of 
the Southerner — the line of power was 
apparent in the expression and bearing 




I-'RAVTs K. WILLARII. 



Each was a noble type, the one more lovely, 



of the woman of the North. 
the other more achieving. 

As a matter of history, public schools, which were established in New 
England within 25 years after the landing of the Pilgrims,- had no room for girls, 
and Harvard College, founded twenty years after the Massachusetts landing, 
V 817 



SiS THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

was for young men, not for their sisters. Half a century passed before public 
schools were granted to the people. It was prophetic that Hartford, Connecticut, 
should witness the first of these — that beautiful city in which Emma Willard 
reached her early fame. The date in Hartford was 1 771, only five years before 
the Revolution. In the South, the better class of girls never dreamed of going 
to the public school ; like the aristocracy of Great Britain, they were taught by 
the governess, a shadowy figure who had small Latin and less Greek — indeed, 
small everything, except a smattering of English, much manner, and unbounded 
deference. This describes the situation in early days ; but when Emma Willard 
sent out from her training school in Troy young and forceful women, combining 
Northern strength with Southern grace, they wrought marvels in the thought 
and development of the Southern woman in those semi-baronial homes which 
slave labor rendered possible, even on a new continent. 

The Dame-School was the source from which Northern girls imbibed the 
little that they knew up to the present century. Our highest authority on this 
subject is Miss Mary F. Eastman, who says that these schools were of an in- 
ferior order, in which women, often those who themselves could hardly more than 
read, would gather a few girls about them, teach them to "make their man- 
ners," according to the ancient phrase, drill the alphabet into their brains, and 
enough beyond that to enable them to spell out the Catechism, which every well- 
regulated girl was obliged to learn by heart. Charles Francis Adams says that 
during the first 150 years of our colonial history "the cultivation of the female 
mind was regarded with utter indifference," and Abigail Adams in one of her 
famous letters declares that " it was fashionable to ridicule female learning." 
These were the days when women given to scolding were condemned to sit in 
public with their tongues- held in cleft sticks, or were thrice dipped from a duck- 
ing stool. Miss Eastman says, referring to this barbarism, "It would be better 
that their tongues had been tamed by instruction to becoming speech, or that 
they had been permitted to drink at the fountain of learning." It is significant 
that in Northampton, Massachusetts, as late as the year 1 788, and in an intelli- 
gent community, where Smith's College is now located, the village fathers voted 
"not to be at the expense for schooling girls." In 1792 the Selectmen of 
Newburyport decided that " during the summer months, when the boys have 
diminished, the Master shall receive girls for instruction in grammar and read- 
ing, after the dismission of the boys in the afternoon, for an hour and a half." 
The visitor to this beautiful and historic seaport is shown with pride the site on 
which stood the school-house to which it is believed women were first admitted 
on this continent to an education at public expense. That was just one 
hundred years ago. The same progressive town voted in 1803 to establish four 
girls' schools, the first on record, which were to be kept six months in the year, 
from six to eight o'clock in the morning and on Thursday afternoon, — for the 



CHURCH AXD SCHOOLS. 819 

boys had the pick of the time as well as the training. We next find it re- 
corded that in 1789, when the Revolutionary War had been over for six years, 
the city of Boston, rising to the occasion, established three reading and writing 
schools, which wen- open all the year round to boys, and to girls from April to 
October. There were no free schools in that city for "that boy's sister" until 
this date. In Rhode Island girls were not admitted to the public schools till 
182S. But little by little the different gates were opened, until in about the 
first quarter of our century girls were permitted to attend the whole year 
through, the same as boys ; but it must be remembered that this was in New 
England, which has always led in everything pertaining to intellectual develop- 
ment. The more remote States followed at a greater distance. Now came the 
battle for the higher education — which was much more difficult. The whole 
woman question was here passed in review, and the conservative cast of mind, 
as was inevitable from its native limitation, declared that the family relation 
would be subverted and the new continent depopulated if women were per- 
mitted to follow their own sweet will in the development of the intellects with 
which, by some strange inconsistency of fate, they were endowed. Much as it 
is the fashion to decry the Church as the great conservative force, let it be 
gratefully remembered by women everywhere, that the first schools of higher 
education were denominational institutions, and resulted from the enlightened 
love of generous fathers, who, having girls of promise in their families, felt that 
they had no right to leave their mental cultivation unprovided for. Happily, 
competition among the different Churches developed along the line of multiply- 
ing these seminaries of higher education for girls, for no Church wished its 
daughters to attend a school founded by some other ! Perhaps this education of 
the future mothers of our nation is the best result to which we can refer in the 
everlasting battle among the broken fragments of the body of Christ. High 
schools for girls did not exist until about the middle of the present century. As 
in the lower grades, the girls came only at early hours, because it was a settled 
principle that they must not be in the same school with boys, and they must in 
nowise inconvenience these latent lords of creation. From the first, however, 
the girls have proved to be so eager for instruction that their fathers, pleased, 
perhaps, to see repetitions of themselves in the vigorous intellects of these little 
ones, have responded to their importunities by establishing separate high 
schools for their daughters. The first to do this was Newburyport again, in 
1S42, and Salem, Mass. (where once they hanged the witches), in 1845, but 
progressive Boston did not found a high school for girls until 1852 — almost two 
hundred years after she had established a Latin school for boys, and more than 
two hundred after the founding of Harvard College for young men. 

The practical outcome of high-school education in these latter years has 
been the State university, and women owe more to this last-named institution 



82o THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

than to any other single force, for their education, up to this time. By the 
inevitable processes of thought, the men who had admitted girls to every 
department of public school instruction could not close to them the doors of 
that highest school — the university. By parity of reasoning, when the uni- 
versity added professional schools, it would have been most illogical to deny to 
the young women, entrance to these ; hence the higher classes of occupation, 
all of which are taught in various State institutions, and later on professional 
schools for doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, etc., have been freely opened to 
young women at State expense. Collegiate training for women was more 
difficult to gain. The pioneer was Oberlin, founded in Ohio, in 1833 ; woman 
was welcomed here from the beginning. Mount Holyoke Seminary, in Massa- 
chusetts, was established in 1S36, by the immortal Mary Lyon — that daughter 
of the people — who, by her unique method of domestic services performed 
wholly by the students, enabled the farmer's daughter to win as good an 
intellectual training as Madam Emma Willard provided in Troy for the 
daughters of the rich. In 1852 Antioch College was founded in Ohio, and 
women were admitted to all of its advantages. In 1862 Cornell University was 
established on the same basis, until now there is not a college west of the 
Alleghanies the advantages of which are not equally offered to the sons and 
daughters of our people, while the Leland Sandford University, recently opened 
on the Pacific Coast, near San Francisco, and having an endowment of 
$20,000,000, is in all its departments free to women. The same is true of the 
great new Chicago University, founded by John D. Rockafeller ; the great 
Northwestern University, of the Methodist Church, at Evanston, in the suburbs 
of the city ; while the Annex of Harvard ; Barnard College, in connection with 
Columbia College, of New York city ; the newly acquired rights of women at 
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and Middlebury College — that 
ancient and honorable institution in Vermont, — with the American University 
of the Methodists, founded by Bishop Hurst, in Washington, D. C, and Evelyn 
College, which is the Annex of Princeton, in New York — mark the latest open- 
ings for women in the fields of higher education — collegiate and professional. 
Vanderbilt, in the South, cannot long resist the oncoming tide, that each day 
cries more insistently, "Place aux dames!" and "The tools to those that can 
use them." 

In 1865 Matthew Vassar founded, in Poughkeepsie, New York, a college 
for women. This was a real college, and, with Smith, Wellesley, and Bryn 
Mawr, shows the high-water mark of woman's separate education in this country. 
Nobody questions that before another generation the colleges that have the 
annex will be themselves annexed, and co-education will universally prevail. 

There is another phase of the higher education of women which has 
exerted a vast influence on the public sentiment of the Republic. Nothing 



SELF-SUPPORT. 821 

shows the advance made in a single century from a more salient point of view, 
than the fact that from having been grudgingly admitted to the lowest grade of 
the public school, and obliged to attend at the unseemly hour of six o'clock in 
the morning, woman, when she had the opportunity, proved herself so worthy 
of it that to-day eighty-two per cent, of all the teachers in the public schools in 
the I 'niteil States are women. The normal schools of the forty-four States, with 
their admirable methods of the latest and most helpful kinds for the acquire- 
ment of thorough training as teachers, swarm with the girl of the period. 
Recently, when I addressed the Normal School near Chicago, under the care of 
that famous educator, Colonel Francis W. Parker, seventy-five fair damsels, in 
graceful reform dress, walked up the aisle to the platform, accompanied by a 
single specimen of the genus homo attired in black, and I laughingly said to 
myself, "Is he in mourning by reason of lonesomeness and lost opportunity, or 
does he serve as an exclamation point to mark the new order of things? " 

Southern women have wakened to a new life since the war. Higher edu- 
cation and self-support are now accepted as a matter of course by all save the 
most prejudiced minds, while the whole cause of woman, in the large sense 
herein defined, is supported by the ablest brains among Southern men and 
women. The White Ribbon movement has been the largest influence thus far 
introduced into that sunny land, to reveal to the home-folk their privileges and 
powers in this Christian civilization. 

Women have been appointed as directors, jointly with men, in the Colum- 
bian Exposition of 1893, and those mighty "auxiliary" departments, which 
mean the convening of philanthropic, educational, religious, and other special- 
ties from every quarter of Christendom for great conventions throughout the 
World's Fair, means more than we thought possible at first, and especially to 
the bright women of the South. 

As a natural outcome of the mental development of women throughout 
the Republic, they have now the range of almost all forms of industry, and are 
practically debarred from none they care to follow. The recent census enu- 
merates over four thousand different branches of employment in which women 
are now engaged, and the consensus of opinion is, that as a class they do 
admirably well. It is no longer considered a token of refinement to live upon 
the toil of others, but women who support themselves have the hearty respect 
and good will of all sensible women and of all members of the other sex whose 
good will and respect are worth desiring. As brain-power is the basis of suc- 
cess in every undertaking, whether it be baking potatoes or writing sonnets, the 
immense amplitude given to the activities of woman-kind is the greatest fact of 
the century. To translate this mass of brain from the dormant to the active 
stage means, not only to the individuals now living, but through the mighty 
forces of heredity to coming generations, more than the greatest mind can 



822 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

possibly perceive. The expansion thus given to the total of brain momentum 
throughout the nation may be trusted to conduct us to such discoveries, inven- 
tions, philosophies, applications of religion, as the most adventurous have not 
yet dreamed, and will, we believe, be for the universal uplifting of the race in 
power, in purity, and peace. 

It is to be remembered that all these mighty opportunities have come to 
women largely by the permission of men. They might have formed industrial 
and other guilds and rigidly excluded women from membership. If men, as a 
class, had been imbued with the spirit manifested by that brilliant writer, Mr. 
Grant Allen (who deliberately declares that there is nothing that woman has 
ever done as well as man can do it, except to extend the census list), where 
would women have been in respect to the development of brain and hand ? 
Mr. Grant Allen remands them to that one occupation in which they have 
distinguished themselves, and says they were "told off" like so many 
soldiers from an army selected to conduct some difficult enterprise, 
and that, having been thus separated to a special work, they have not in 
the nature of the case a right to scatter elsewhere. But as he is the 
only man who has ever said this in public and in so many words, and as our 
brothers of the journalistic pen have impaled him without mercy on the point 
of that swift weapon, we may conclude that the common sense of universal 
manhood has reached the conclusion : Let any woman do whatever thing she 
can do well. Upon this basis all business colleges and schools for typewriting 
and shorthand are now open to women ; manual training and industrial schools 
admit them freely ; colleges and universities, professional schools and art classes, 
accord them every advantage ; the whole field of journalism is open to them, 
and but two citadels yet remain to be captured, — those of ecclesiastical and civil 
power. Sapping and mining are going on vigorously around these citadels, and 
many of their outposts have been already taken. Twenty-three States have 
already granted school suffrage ; Kansas has municipal, and Wyoming com- 
plete suffrage for women. In the younger denominations women stand 
equal with men in the pulpit as well as out of it, and the question of inducting 
them into every position in the great denominations is being actively discussed 
and often favorably commented upon by the great constituency of ministers, 
editors, and publicists. 

The place of woman in literature is striking. Here she has won the 
largest standing room. No publisher asks the question, " Did a woman furnish 
that manuscript?" but he pays according to its merit. The same is true in 
journalism. Clubs for women are springing up everywhere, philanthropic 
guilds are numerous, there are religious societies practically without number, 
and reform movements are more vigorously directed by women than by the 
most notable or most distinguished experts among men. 



IN THE PROFESSIONS. 823 

Perhaps no feature of this splendid evolution is more remarkable than the last, 
namely, the intellectual development of woman as a home-maker. The bright, 
well-disciplined intellects among society women have now found their exact niche. 
They are somewhat too conservative to take up the temperance reform or the 
suffrage movement, although we believe that almost without exception these 
great enterprises have their hearty sympathy, but in the department of woman 
as a housekeeper and home-maker they find a congenial field. They would 
help lift this profession from the plane of drudgery. They would so train the 
household workers, once called servants, that theirs shall be a veritable voca- 
tion. All that science and art can do to elevate the culinary department of the 
home, to improve its sanitary conditions, and to embellish its surroundings, 
these women are determined to see done. The number of new industries and 
the subdivisions or new avocations that will grow out of this movement are 
incalculable. We rejoice in it, for while we firmly believe in the old French 
motto, " Place aux dames ! " and "The tools to those that can use them," we 
always think that the mother is the central figure of our civilization, and to be 
treated accordingly ; that the home-maker is the genius of what is most holy 
and happy in our lives. We believe that invention, science, education, and re- 
ligion should converge in systematic fashion upon the evolution of the home, 
which evolution is bound to come, and is rapidly keeping pace with develop- 
ments in all other lines of human uplift. 

While it pains a progressive woman to hear any man speak as if the home 
bounded the sphere of her sex, and while we believe the highest duty of all 
women is to help make the whole world home-like ; while we believe that woman 
will bless and brighten every place she enters, and that she will enter every 
place, we would sympathize with the possibilities of honorable employment and 
of high development to those who bring just as much talent, discipline, and de- 
votion to the building up of home as others do to the larger world outside. In 
making the transition from woman as a cipher outside of home, to the splendid 
civilization that welcomes her to every one of its activities, it was necessary for 
the " present distress " to emphasize out of their due proportion the importance 
of education, industrial avocations, philanthropic vocations, science, and art for 
women. But when the pendulum swings to its extreme limit, and Church and 
State are freely opened to her, we feel sure it will swing to the harmony of a 
real circuit described by the interests of home, and our brightest brains, most 
skillful hands, and deepest hearts shall give themselves to the beautiful amen- 
ities and sacred ministries of that institution which has been called, and not too 
often, " Our Heaven below." 

A book is now being written entitled "A Woman of the Nineteenth 
Century," and is to include one thousand names of American women. It is 
found entirely practicable to gather up so large a number of notable names 



824 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

illustrative of the different forms of activity in which women are now engaged. 
This being true, it is a hopeless endeavor to characterize even the most repre- 
sentative women in an article like the present. To do so would but invite the 
criticism of making invidious distinctions. 

The political activities of women have been perhaps more criticised than 
any others. Naturally enough, perhaps, as politics is to-day the arena where 
men fight with ballots rather than with bayonets or bullets. But in England the 
Primrose Dames and the Women of the Liberal League are a mighty factor in 
working out the' rights of the people on the one hand, and the preservation of 
aristocratic prerogative on the other. ■ This country has yet had no political 
uprising of women to match that of the motherland, but the Prohibition party 
has for years had women as its truest allies, and in the People's party they take 
equal rank with men, while both declare for the ballot in the hand of woman as 
her rightful weapon. Conventions, committee meetings, newspaper organs, and 
the public platform all bear the impress to-day of the growing intelligence and 
disciplined zeal of women as partisans. This is but the beginning of a new 
movement, the consequences of which promise to be more vast than any we 
have yet attained in the mighty development of the multitudinous woman 
question. 

There was in the Declaration of Independence the percussive force of 
giant powder when we deliberately said, "All men are born free and equal, and 
have certain inalienable rights, and among these rights are life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness." We then and there invoked that trinity of issues which 
are to-day involved in the mighty " Human Question," namely, the labor 
question, temperance question, and the woman question. Not until all these 
have been wrought out into statutes and constitutions will there be rest for 
the land. It is a blessed fact that woman cannot rise alone. From the first 
she has been at the bottom of the human pyramid ; she has the mother heart, 
and the stream cannot rise higher than its fountain. Whatever lifts and puts 
better conditions about her in all stages of her earthly life, does the same for 
every son she gives to the nation by daring to walk the Via Doloroso of Danger 
when she passes the sacred but terrible ordeal of motherhood. 

Well has the poet sung that " Men and women rise and fall together, 
dwarfed or god-like, bond or free." No woman worthy of the name forgets 
that she had a father and brother in her early home, and for their sake, as much 
as for mother's and sister's sake, all true women seek to help both men and 
women in the solution of the great problems of modern civilization. To be 
strong-minded was once thought a crime in woman, but upon strength of mind 
there is a premium now. The bread-winning weapon, eagerly sought and firmly 
held in the delicate but untrembling hand of woman, is the only sword she 
needs. We would make her thoroughly independent of marriage, that she 



SPHERE OF WOMEN. 825 

still might choose its old and sacred path from motives more complimentary to 
the man of her choice than that " He will be a good provider." We would 
educate her thoroughly, that she might be the comrade of her husband and her 
sons, for while religion and affection form two of the strands in the cable that 
binds human hearts together in the home, we believe that intellectual sympathy 
is that third bright strand which this glad age is weaving, and that no charm 
more holy or enduring survived the curse in Eden. We would endow her with 
power in Church and State, that these two hierarchies might belong to the 
many and not the few, to the people, and not to priest and politician. We 
would make woman partner in the great world's activities, that she might more 
greatly endow the children whose gifts depend so largely on her goodness, 
greatness, and grace. 

Frances E. Willard. 



CHAPTER XLIX. 

THE AMERICAN CHURCH. 



BY BISHOP J. II. VINCENT, 
Chancellor of Chautauqua 



As the century draws toward its end. and men make careful survey of the 
work it has wrought in the many and varied fields of human activity, it is natural 
that each observer should take a special interest in the department which con- 
stitutes his specialty. The statesman studies the social and political phenomena 
and forces of the age. The scientist, the educator, the manufacturer, the finan- 
cier, the merchant, find in their respective 
spheres problems to be taken in hand and 
carefully investigated, that the experience 
of the past may become wisdom for the 
future. While this division of labor may 
tend to develop one-sidedness in the indi- 
vidual, it provides ample material for the 
true student of history, who, by collecting 
the data furnished by these various inves- 
tigators, may make wide and wise gener- 
alizations, and thus contribute to a more 
complete study of human nature and human 
history. The increase of general interest 
among special observers and students will 
ensure in due time cooperation, increased 
intelligence, and enthusiasm in the promo- 
tion of the highest civilization. 

BISHOP J. II. VINCENT. ° 

As the procession of the years which 
form the most wonderful century of human history closes its solemn march, those 
who look on time as deriving its chief worth from its relations to eternity, and who 
estimate civilization as it bears upon the immortal character of man, will of 
necessity judge a century by its religious quality and results, asking : What place 
has religion held, what work has it wrought, what errors have weakened it, what 

827 




828 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

are the tendencies which now dominate it, what are the opportunities which open 
before it ? 

In pursuance of this line of inquiry, I purpose in the present chapter, which 
I have consented to contribute to this " Memorial Story of America," to consider 
the place of the American Church in the nineteenth century, the ruling thought 
and force determining its policy and influence, and the work it is expected to 
attempt just beyond the open portals of the twentieth century. 

The religious thought of the United States is chiefly Christian, for this is a 
Christian nation, and the Church of the American people is the American Church ; 
not Greek, not Roman, not English, but American ; expressing its power and 
putting forth its endeavors under the control of Christian and American ideas. 
For these ideas which we call American are essentially Christian ; products of 
the Christian revelation, embodied in a form of civilization which is as real an 
outcome of the direct divine providence as was the civilization of Moses or the 
religious institutions growing out of the ministry of Jesus. 

The American type of Christianity is in advance of all other Christian types, 
since it grows among and permeates political and social ideas and institutions 
which give it larger and fuller opportunities than it has ever before known, 
opportunities to develop humanity on all sides and in all relations. The 
American Church is made up of all individuals, classes, societies, and agencies 
which bear the Christian name or hold the Christian thought. It is not a "State 
Church." It is not a " union Church " — constituted by the formal unification of 
diverse sects or denominations. It embraces all believers (and in a sense all 
citizens) without visible consolidation ; it favors all without legislative interference ; 
it gives freedom to all without partiality or discrimination. 

The distinguishing feature of American life, which makes what we call 
" freedom " mean more and promise more than does the civil, political, and 
religious freedom of any other land, and which therefore gives a distinctive 
character to the American Church, is that the liberty of the individual has large 
and unhampered opportunity for growth and action. Individual liberty here is 
actual liberty ; unhindered by governmental provisions for privileged classes — 
sovereigns, princes, nobles — who, by the accident of birth, leap into place and 
prerogative without merit of their own, and whose unearned advantage is 
detrimental to the well-being of the multitude. It is liberty which carries with 
it opportunity, — the liberty of the lowest in the nation to reach the rank of the 
highest ; of the poorest to become the richest ; of the most ignorant to become 
the most learned ; of the most despised to become the most honored ; the liberty 
of every man to know all that he can know, to be all that he can be, and do all 
that he pleases to do, so long as he does not interfere with the right of any other 
man to know all that he can know, to be all that he can be, and to do all that 
he pleases to do. It is the liberty among brothers, who, with all the prerogatives 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF FREEDOM. 829 

of individuality, need not forget the brotherhood of man, and who have every 
inducement not merely to guarantee to each other this regal right of full 
personal development, but who easily learn how to render mutual aid — every 
man helping every other man to know all that he can know, be all that he can 
be, and to do all that he pleases to do. 

This, then, is the ideal of American civilization : A nation of equals, who 
are brothers. This is the doctrine of the closing American century ; the root 
of the goodly tree that covers such ample area with its fruitful and bending 
branches ; the vine which the right hand of the Lord our God hath planted ; this 
the lesson running along the bars and shining out of the stars of our national flag. 

It is necessary that the race experiment with this great idea of freedom and 
fraternity. It is an idea that sounds well in rhyme and song, but it must stand 
the test of practice as well ; and is it capable of this ? May this large Gospel 
of the Christ be realized by a nation, and this nation become in spirit and fact 
a church ? This is the glorious thought running through the civilization of our 
century, and this we believe to be the purpose of the God of nations. During 
the past century the Republic has made a series of experiments on the 
various classes and races which have been shipped to our shores from foreign 
ports. We are, in fact, in the very midst of this experimental process and 
period. We glorify the Declaration of Independence. We are yet to prove 
that its doctrines are practicable. We insist that the race can easily dispense 
with kings, nobles, hierarchies, and all other aristocracies ; that the nation 
entrusted with this great gift of human freedom can endure the severe tests to 
which she is subjected by the immigration and emancipation of uneducated and 
degraded masses of humanity. 

It is comparatively easy to be fair, friendly, and even fraternal with people 
of our own kind, who share our Saxon blood, speak our language, hold our 
political and religious ideas, and live after our fashion ; but the American idea 
— the fruit of the earliest Christian idea — requires fairness and fraternity with 
all — with people of alien blood and of alien faith. Can we welcome and assimi- 
late this inrushing tide of Irish Romanism, with centuries of tumult and trucu- 
lence in their veins ; of Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians, who have 
never yet learned to spell the first syllable of the word " Freedom," and yet 
who are scarcely on our shores before they are clothed with the rights of citizen- 
ship, about the responsibilities of which they know nothing? Can the seasoned 
and cultured Puritan of the North and the refined cavalier of the South clasp 
hands with the representatives of this surging mass of humanity, and say, 
" Welcome, man ! Welcome, brother ! " ? And what of the Negro, and of the 
Chinaman? Is the Republic equal in force of sympathy to the breadth, warmth, 
and splendor of her own theory of individual freedom and universal brother- 
hood ? 



CULTIVATION AND WORSHIP. 831 

The distinctive feature of the nineteenth century in America is the struggle 
for the recognition of these two noble ideas: The freedom of the individual and 
the brotherhood of the race. And this thought is thoroughly religious. It is 
preeminently Christian. It was taught, enforced, and illustrated by the Nazarene. 
It is asserting itself in our civilization. The work is now going on. It has not 
gone far, but it is bound to go on to the blessed end. The leaven is working 
every day. We are in the midst of the great experiment. 

There is, however, more in religion than the recognition of human rights 
and the cultivation of good will. To serve humanity is only one side of human 
duty. Man must worship. He is "a religious animal." Comte and his school 
may be contented to bow at the shrine of Humanity, but the common sense and 
inborn reverence of the race demand a personal Deity, to whom the individual 
can come with his sin, and grief, and longing of soul. Everywhere and in all 
ages we find this religious instinct, deep-seated, and usually passionate and 
intense. It builds temples, kindles altar-fires, sets up shrines and symbols, 
inspires prayer and song, and expresses itself among all peoples in fastings and 
thanksgivings, in surrenders and self-sacrifices. The more highly cultivated a 
nation, the more truly reverent it is. Where the schools are, there are the 
churches. The Church, in this land and age of freedom and progress, is the 
most popular and the most effective of our institutions. Men may neglect its 
services temporarily, and in times of excessive activity, but in days of worry, 
bereavement, and peril, and under normal conditions of thoughtfulness and high 
and noble aspiration, they turn to the Bible, the ministry, the restful charms of 
religious literature, and the stimulating power of pulpit ministries. 

In America these statements find ample illustration. A free people, we are 
a reverent and church-loving people. Standing for the rights of humanity, we 
stand by the religious creeds and customs of our fathers. The advanced and 
independent thought of our age modifies but does not destroy these religious 
faiths and ordinances. There is much doubt afloat ; the perversions of truth 
have wrought their evil work ; audacious infidels fulminate against Church and 
Bible ; some scientific men, unduly devoted to the physical, have become dull 
and unsusceptible on the side of the spiritual ; but on the whole, there is more 
Bible study, more gospel preaching, more church-going, more reverence of 
speech and life, than ever. And it is almost amusing here in free America, 
where no State Church or civil restrictions have imposed any belief upon the 
people, after a century of thorough religious independence and of boastful and 
arrogant skepticism, to find "infidel" real estate agents building churches, or 
donating lots to denominations who pledge themselves to build, in the new 
towns and villages which these skeptical speculators are " booming. " 
All of which goes to prove that the root of our civilization is religious, 
and that the institution which fosters religion is a necessity. We heed more 



832 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

than ever the second part of the divine law, "Love thy neighbor;" but more 
than ever we bow in reverence to obey the first : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God * * * Him only shalt thou serve." 

The American Church is not a State Church. It is supported not by law, 
but by love. No large subsidies corrupt it. No political complications weaken 
it. Church and State serve each other best when the only bond between them 
is one of individual conviction and mutual confidence. The beginnings of the 
Republic were made by religious men, who organized religious communities. 
They sought our shores to secure religious liberty. Some of them may have 
been narrow, but they were true and brave. Some of the fetters that bound 
them had been severed, but some still remained. They had not yet conceived 
the idea of an emancipated and responsible individuality. Protestants fled 
from Roman rule, and Roman-Romanists fled from the oppressions of Roman- 
Protestants. And it took a long time for Protestants to become free. Romanists 
are not yet free. They were not from Rome who banished Roger Williams, and 
who lighted the witch-fires of Salem ; and they are not Protestants who still 
fasten their faith to an infallible Pope, implicitly obey a priesthood professing 
to be divinely endowed and empowered, telling secrets, which God alone should 
know, to self-constituted father-confessors, who have no right, human or divine, 
thus to tamper with and torture the individual conscience. But the founders 
and fathers of the Republic were religious and God-fearing men. They were 
simply pupils (" primary pupils " at that) in the school of human rights and 
human brotherhood. The lessons were long and hard. It has taken more 
than a century to get half through the "first reader," and there is ample work 
for the century ahead, but as a people we are coming to see the life of the Church 
in the aims and order of the State, and to learn that God is in all history, that His 
claims upon men extend to all social relations, sanctifying all secular and 
political life, and embracing charity, sympathy, and justice in the minutest details 
of life, as well as awe, reverence, and worship. 

Two important religious movements greatly aided, during the formative 
years of the Republic, in developing a true religious life, in promoting a more 
thorough knowledge of God's Word, and in giving a just conception of the 
worth and responsibilities of the individual. The one was the spread among 
all the Churches, and among the out-of-Church multitudes, of the spirit and 
doctrines of Methodism, which the distinguished Presbyterian divine of Scotland 
called " Christianity in earnest." I do not now refer to the separate ecclesi- 
astical system known as Methodism, but to the general revival in the last 
century of New Testament doctrines, spirit, effort ; the doctrines of personal 
freedom and responsibility, of universal redemption and privilege, which lie at 
the very basis of republican life ; the spirit of love and equality which fill the 
heart of men with good will, and the effort, personal and persistent, which sent 



UNITY OF FAITH AND EFFORT. 833 

men after men with divine intent, into highways and hedges, into cottages and 
palaces, a spirit of zeal, love, and importunity. This movement in America, 
under the leadership of far-seeing and devout men, touched every part of the 
continent, north, south, east, and west. It set other pulpits on fire. It modified 
rigid theological creeds. It breathed warmth and power into church forms. It 
disintegrated the masses. It put into the degraded poor and the frivolous rich 
the sense of personal responsibility to God and to the neighbor. It awakened 
conscience and hope. Thus, Methodism created Christian citizens, without 
which there can be no republic. All branches of the Christian Church have 
testified to the stimulating power of the Methodist awakening at the organizing 
of the nation. 

Simultaneously with the rise of the Republic began the great Sunday-school 
system, which went everywhere with the open Bible and the living teacher, with 
inspiring Christian songs, attractive books for week-day reading, juvenile 
pictorial papers, social gatherings, and the stimulating power of friendly fellow- 
ship in religious life. It brought the people together, old and young, learned 
and unlearned, rich and poor. It did more to " level up " society than any 
other agency in the Republic. It made the adult who taught susceptible and 
affectionate childhood a better citizen. It prepared the children to be wiser, 
more conscientious, and more loyal citizens in the next generation. In the 
widely extended Methodist revival, and in the all-embracing Sunday-school 
movement, we see the hand of God fashioning the Nation and the Church, that 
they might be one in aim and spirit, and that through them might be promoted 
liberty, equality, and fraternity. 

The various branches or denominations of the American Church are influ- 
enced by these ruling ideas of the century : the freedom and unrestricted 
opportunity of the individual and the spirit of generous fraternity. The old 
warfare between the Protestant denominations has virtually ceased. Coopera- 
tion in religious and reformatory effort — the Young Men's Christian Association, 
the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Young People's Society of 
Christian Endeavor, the International Lesson system, the State and Interna 
tional Sunday-school Conventions, the Evangelical Alliance, the Chautauqua 
Assemblies, the exchange of pulpits, the frequent union revival meetings held 
by representative evangelists, the ease with which ministers pass from one 
denomination to another, the warm, personal friendships between representative 
leaders of the several Churches, the growth and enrichment of non-denomina- 
tional periodical literature — these are some of the signs of the larger thought 
now controlling our people. Organic and external union is unnecessary. It 
would be a burden and a bondage. The emphasis which its advocates put upon 
it is and must be unfavorable to freedom and individuality. It is a significant 
fact that the five or six sects of Christendom which make the most of external 

5.5 



834 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

unity are more widely separated in organization, sympathy, and Christian 
endeavor than are those branches of the Church which lay stress on doctrine, 
spirit, and conduct, and leave outward unity to be the spontaneous outgrowth 
of truth and love. In increasing numbers, the lay members of those Churches 
whose ministry (usually regarded as a " priesthood ") makes so much of outward 
uniformity are entering emphatic protest against this narrow and unscriptural 
view of Christian and Church unity. 

One problem remains to be solved in order to the promotion of true 
catholicity : How shall the feeble denominations on the frontier more effectually 
cooperate ? The denominational life has its advantages. The only serious 
objection to it, as at present organized in America, is the rivalry in sparsely 
settled communities, where there is at present room for but one society. Each 
Church, from its metropolitan centre, to increase its strength and promote its 
growth, is constantly pushing out into new fields, building new churches, 
organizing new congregations. In the normal growth of every such community 
there soon comes to be a demand for all denominations, but for a few years the 
cooperation of these feeble fragments of the several regiments in the army of 
the Lord is most desirable, and it is possible to effect such -temporary combina- 
tion and yet retain the denominational distinctions for a later development. 
Here, for example, is a Kansas town where there are twenty-five Congrega- 
tionalists, twenty Baptists, twenty Methodists, thirty Presbyterians, ten Protest- 
ant Episcopalians, and thirty more believers of other communions. Must we 
have five or six separate churches in this frontier town ? Some day we must. 
If the town should grow, we may, within ten years, need ten different churches, 
and it will be just as well for the cause of humanity to have the ten represent 
ten different denominations as to be all of "one faith and order." The "first," 
"second," and "third" churches of a single "sect" are less likely to be on 
good living and working terms with each other than three churches of three 
different kinds. The social lines are less likely to be drawn in the church. 
The questions of doctrine are more likely to be discussed. Varieties of con- 
viction and taste are more likely to be satisfied. A larger number of repre- 
sentative leaders, men of power, are more likely to visit the place during the 
year and give it the benefit of their genius and experience. But in the 
meantime, in the early time of that community, why divide and struggle ? why 
appear for so slight a reason to be in rivalry ? Why not organize one church. 
with its several sections or classes — regular churches in the germ — bound to 
help on the common cause while all are weak ; bound, later on, as each develops 
in strength and numbers, to become self-supporting churches in different por- 
tions of the new city? Why may not these thirty Presbyterians, in the begin- 
ning, rally around the common centre ; support the present minister ; work in 
the Sunday-school ; show zeal, magnanimity, and love ; and at the very time 



836 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

they are thus building up the cause of Christ in a cooperative church, hold an 
occasional meeting of the Presbyterian "class ;" subscribe for the Presbyterian 
papers ; contribute to the Presbyterian benevolences ; train their children at 
home in the Presbyterian catechism ; and make sure of a lot in some part of 
the town for a future Presbyterian church ? In this way the denominational 
spirit — the regimental spirit — may be maintained and the spirit of large 
catholicity promoted. The plan is practicable. The coming century will wit- 
ness more than one successful experiment in this scheme of denominational and 
catholic cooperation. 

The American idea of personal freedom and true fraternity has met its 
most serious opposition from that singular ecclesiastical and political organiza- 
tion known as the Roman Catholic Church. But on the members of that great 
foreign secret society America is gradually exerting an emancipating influence. 
The diligence, vigilance, and persistency of the priesthood is marvelous, but 
every year the power of free thought and general good will so characteristic of 
our civilization is disintegrating the great mass of Roman subserviency and 
superstition which Europe has shipped to our shores. The laymen are begin- 
ning to apply to their Church relations the doctrines of the Republic, and to 
demand from their leaders freedom of thought and speech. The Roman 
Church has been compelled to allow what it never before encouraged — the 
holding of laymen's congresses, — and it will not much longer dare to prevent 
free discussion. The national flag floats over many of the parochial schools. 
The old policy of the Jesuits, to divide the school fund between public and sec- 
tarian schools, is yielding to their new policy, which aims to control the public 
school by bringing its interests into the political arena, and securing Roman 
school-teachers of our American and Protestant children through the old politi- 
cal processes by which they now secure the control of the police force and other 
partisan advantages in many of our American cities : and this new scheme of 
the old foe to freedom is awakening the American Republic, and will receive the 
rebuke it deserves. Our people are fair and generous, but generosity may go 
too far. The Church of Rome is a political power, and as such it must be 
treated. Its members are American citizens, and must be recognized as such ; but 
all interference with the true doctrines of American freedom, and with the rights 
of the individual, must be as sharply rebuked when it assumes an ecclesiastical 
form — Roman or Mormon — as when it becomes a kingdom or a confederacy 
within the Republic. The public school must be maintained. The cry against it 
as "godless" is absurd. It is not and must not be a sectarian nor in any 
formal sense a religious institution. The closing of the school-house on the 
Sabbath is a sufficient tribute to the religious idea. The school of the Nation, 
by closing its doors on the one day of the week which is accounted by most of 
our citizens a holy day, offers to the home and to the Church opportunity for 



NO CREED BUT REPUBLICANISM. S37 

religious instruction. Let the public school be a school of American ideas, of 
the doctrines contained in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitu- 
tion of the United States. Let it teach the true history of the Republic. Hoist 
the national flag above it. Train the children to sing our national songs and 
observe the national holidays. Bring the children of all classes and of all faiths 
into friendly fellowship on the playground and into helpful rivalry in the recita- 
tion room. Keep out of the public school all sectarianism and partisan politics. 
Make no compromise with the priesthood ; refuse to divide the public school 
funds ; tear off all ecclesiastical badge and garb from the public school teacher ; 
train every child to be a free American, to honor all men, and to observe the 
Golden Rule. This policy will irritate still more the promoters of foreign 
societies in the Republic, but it will create a public sentiment which servile tools 
of a foreign ecclesiastical system on our shores cannot longer resist. 

The American Church, which imposes no creed but the creed of the 
Republic, which knows no lines of division — sectarian, political, or territorial — but 
which seeks the well-being of the individual and the fellowship of all true 
citizens, will soon wield an immense influence in matters political. It will discuss 
great ethical questions ; it will carry conscientiousness and independence into 
political action ; it will dissipate the weak heresy that Christians are not to take 
part in national affairs. In the days of Christ and the Apostles, the governing 
powers, the rulers of this world, were beyond the touch and control of the 
people. It was for them humbly to serve and uncomplainingly to suffer. But 
now all this has been changed. The people to-day stand where Caesar used to 
stand ; and to be a thoughtful, conscientious, active, consistent politician, is to be 
doing God's service. The church member who neglects political duty is guilty 
of sin against both God and the neighbor. The power of the people will be felt 
for good when the people begin to know and to defend the true and the good. 
They have during the century expressed the purpose of the American Church on 
the subject of slavery. At its declaration the shackles have fallen. They have 
recently pronounced on the subject of the Louisiana Lottery. Through the 
press, the ballot, and the authority of law, the moral force of the nation 
nation expresses itself and the base conspirators surrender. So must it be with 
the saloon, and with all political evil. If politicians carry moral questions into 
the political arena, the pulpit and all other agencies of the church must go with 
the questions to which every consideration — moral, political, and religious — they 
are pledged to stand. 

One of the most significant movements of modern times, a product of this 
century, and a guarantee of strength and light for the century to come, is that 
known as Chautauqua, which through more than sixty summer centres, and 
through correspondence and home-reading methods, which are accepted by tens 



838 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of thousands of adult students in all parts of the nation, is awakening the older 
part of our population to the value of the higher culture. Chautauqua aims to 
place before full-grown men and women, especially those who were not favored 
with early educational advantages, the possibility of intellectual growth even in 
the years of maturity. It insists that men in middle life may acquire knowledge, 
literary taste, and habits of close and careful thought ; that lowly homes, full 
of hard work, may be made interesting ; that parents, hitherto indifferent to the 
education of their children, may become both helpers and inspirers ; that by this 
awakened parental interest more students may be sent to the colleges and 
universities ; business men and mechanics may be brought to take an interest 
in something besides trade ; Christian people may have more light, breadth, and 
power put into their lives ; the various elements of the community be lifted to 
a higher plane of thought, and thus the more certainly and effectively combined 
to improve the manners, the morals, the laws, the tone of society and of the 
State. 

Chautauqua believes in the sacredness of life and responsibility. All rela 
tions and activities hitherto called secular are charged with religious significance 
Religion touches and blesses every hour of every day — the years and the 
decades through. It transforms into religion, service in kitchen, field, and shop, 
fellowships in parlor and sanctuary, education, travel, and commerce — every- 
thing pertaining to life. Wholesome and holy motives should control us in al! 
things, always, everywhere. 

The American Church, founded on the large ideas of individual freedom, 
responsibility, and brotherhood, finds its almost perfect realization in this beau 
tiful product of the century — the Chautauqua Movement. "It is folly," said 3 
distinguished Irish scholar and churchman, when informed that at Chautauqua 
representatives of fifteen different religious bodies meet in harmony, discussing 
their points of difference with utmost frankness and liberality, and then unite in 
public religious worship, "It is folly to think of such a thing; it cannot be," 
he said. After spending ten days in the groves of Chautauqua, critically exam- 
ining the theory and methods of the system, he said, " It is really so. It is 
really so. You have the perfection of Christian unity here." And concerning 
the Sunday morning service in the great amphitheatre, with organs, chorus- 
choir, five thousand worshipers, engaging in a service both liturgical and 
extemporaneous, earnest preaching on great doctrinal, historical, and ethical 
principles, the same foreign churchman said, "It was the most impressive religi- 
ous service I ever attended in my life." 

Thus Chautauqua concentrates and embodies in its great social, educa- 
tional, and religious work, for all classes, all people, of all creeds, of all sorts 
and conditions, the fundamental ideas of the century which lie at the basis of 



THE CHAUTAUQUA. 839 

the American Church, and which are wrought into our very Constitution. God 
over all and in all : God our Father ; Man His creature and His child ; man 
free, responsible, independent ; man the brother of every other man, entitled 
to reverence, good-will, fairness, and love ; Jesus the elder Brother, the Saviour 
of humanity ; our civilization in its material, educational, moral and religious 
conditions and relations, the sphere and opportunity for the working out ot the 
divine and gracious purpose by which the kingdom of God is to come, and the 
will of God is to "be done in earth as it is in Heaven." 

J. H. Vincent. 




FIRST TRAIN OF CARS IN AMERICA. 




CHAPTER L. 

THE OUTLOOK. 

T has been said that the childhood of most men and women who 
become distinguished predicts the achievements of the future, and 
is a kind of prelude to the later story of work and success. 
Whether or not this be true of individuals, it is certainly true that in 
many respects the earliest history of this country predicted its later 
and greater history. Whoever reads the opening chapters of this 
volume cannot fail to be impressed by the cosmopolitan character 
of the earliest contacts of the Old World with the New. There 
is very little doubt that the first discoverers of this continent were the Norse- 
men ; but it was from the extreme south of Europe that the historic discoverer 
came, and this Genoese sailor had his aid and support from Spain. So the 
Scandinavian and the men of Latin race shared in the first perils and the first 
honors. 

They were quickly followed by Englishmen, Frenchmen, and men from the 
low countries. Spain, France, and England were eager and pertinacious com- 
petitors for the control of the new empire in the West, and the final supremacy 
of English rule was established only after long and arduous struggles, supple- 
mented later by purchase and peaceful annexation. When the colonists ceased 
to be colonists and established their own government nearly every leading race 
in Europe was largely represented in the new Republic ; in many sections, as in 
New England, New York, parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and 
Georgia, the stamp of different races was as distinct as in the countries beyond 
the sea. On the island of New York eighteen languages were spoken before 
the Revolution. Thus early was the cosmopolitan character of the population 
indicated ; thus early was the mingling of races in the New World fore- 
shadowed and predicted. 

The question of emigration is, therefore, no new question in America ; for 
this is the country of emigrants and their descendants. English blood holds 

841 



S 4 2 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

the primacy among us, and remote emigration is regarded as conferring more 
distinction than recent emigration ; Richard Grant White defined an American 
as one whose ancestors had come into the country before the Revolution. It 
is, after all, a question of time ; for, earlier or later, we have all been emigrants. 
Professor Freeman was fond of saying that we are Englishmen who have made 
a second migration. This reminds us that the race at home were emigrants 
also ; but we differ from them in the more recent date of our migration and in 
the fact that we have drawn upon many races instead of upon one or two. So 
far the men of English descent have had the leadership, and have stamped their 
political education, traditions, and character upon our social and political organ- 
ization. That foundation is not likely to be disturbed. The genius or spirit of 
our national life is essentially English, and English it is likely to remain ; but 
other races have already modified and will still more distinctly modify our habits, 
tastes, and standards in the future. We are not a homogeneous but a cosmo- 
politan country, and in this fact lies our greatest departure from the ideals and 
expectations of our earlier statesmen and patriots, and here is the source of our 
greatest dangers. Here, also, it must be immediately added, lies the greatness 
of our opportunity. 

It is one of the impressive facts in history that national destiny, like the 
destiny of individuals, shows a constant tendency to escape from the orderly 
and comparatively safe lines marked out for it by political leaders, into larger 
and more perilous ways. The voyage which was planned to follow the coast 
lines is suddenly converted into an ocean voyage, and the ship, instead of 
anchoring in some quiet harbor, is storm-tossed on the great seas. Ships were 
made for voyaging rather than for anchorage, however, and nations were framed 
for great and fruitful achievements rather than for that quiet and sluggish 
prosperity which men often crave as the easiest and safest lot in life. A com- 
pact, homogeneous people, of quiet, conservative temper, without strong 
passions or deep convictions, would probably be easily governed ; it is certain 
that such a people would be devoid of interest and influence, and that it would 
make no history worth the reading or the writing. Individuals who have had 
the opportunity of vegetating have found it eminently unsatisfactory and have 
eagerly exchanged ease and repose for action and danger. Life, to individuals 
and to nations, is more than food and raiment. 

In any event, the comparatively simple questions which the men of the 
Colonial and Revolutionary times met and answered with comparative success 
have been succeeded by problems vastly more complex and difficult, which they 
did not foresee and from which many of them would undoubtedly have drawn 
back with a feeling of dismay. The homogeneous population has become 
heterogeneous ; the man of English descent is almost outvoted by men of other 
and, to him, of alien blood. In many localities what is called the foreign vote 



WORKING OUT THE HUMAN PROBLEM. 



Hi 



is the controlling vote. Jew and Greek, Scandinavian and Latin, the Oriental 
and the African are domiciled here ; not in insignificant numbers and few locali- 
ties, but in almost all parts of the country and in great and influential numbers. 
If the doors were to be closed against further immigration to-day the problems 
of the country would be largely imposed upon it by the mingling of races which 
has already gone on here, and its place and work in the historical development 
of the race would be largely determined by the same factor. 

For this mingling of races, on so great a scale and upon terms of political 
equality, is new in history. It was predicted by our earliest history, and now 




A VERY OLD WOOLEN MILL IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, AND A MILL OF THE SECOND PERIOD ATTACHED THERETO, 
SHOWING THE BARN-ROOF, SO CALLED — THE GERM OF A LARGE ESTABLISHMENT. 



that it has become a controlling fact in the situation it predicts in turn what is 
likely to be the peculiar and specific work of the country in its general relations 
to civilization. Give a nation time enough and it will reveal a genius which is 
peculiar to itself, and the broad lines of a national achievement in some special 
direction. Now, it cannot escape any thoughtful reader of this Story of 
America that here, for the first time, are furnished all the conditions for the 
working out of the human problem, so far as the relations of man to man are 
concerned. Matthew Arnold, who was never misled by popular sympathies, 
has left on record his opinion that while we have solved the political problem we 
have not solved the human problem. YVe have not solved this final and greatest 



8 4 4 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

of all the problems, because no one nation can solve it ; its solution will be the 
consummation of civilization, and must be contributed to by every race. For 
the human problem involves not only the adjustment of man to man in all rela- 
tions, but the adjustment of man to the entire environment of his life ; involves, 
therefore, religion, science, art, literature, and philosophy as well as political, 
social, and industrial relations. To the solution of this greater problem many 
contributions have been made, and each race in succession has added to the 
common fund, the accumulation of which ought to secure the ultimate free- 
dom and harmony of humanity to discern and use the best that life offers. 

Our contribution to this general result promises to be the working out of 
the problems which grow out of the political and economic relations of man to 
man. The colonists who made the successful struggle for political independ- 
ence, fought for and secured certain definite and invaluable political rights and 
ends ; they thought mainly of the value of free government for themselves. 
They did not and could not foresee the greater part which the new people was 
to play in the affairs of the world ; they did not and could not foresee the place 
and function of the new country in the development of the greater community 
of humanity. Demosthenes, with true and fiery patriotism, endeavored to 
avert what seemed to him the destructive calamity of conquest by the Mace- 
donians ; he did not and could not foresee that the success of Philip was not 
only inevitable, but that it meant the diffusion of the spirit which had its home 
in the city he loved, throughout the entire eastern world. In her decline as a 
separate political community, Athens became the teacher and intellectual leader 
of the civilized world. 

We are able to deal with this problem of fitting man to man harmoniously 
in all relations for three reasons : We have an immense territory, discovered 
and opened at a comparatively late period in the history of the world ; we have 
an unprecedented and, so far. practically unrestrained mingling of races ; and 
we have political equality. A broad field, a free field, and the presence of the 
races which have hitherto lived apart — these are all the elements for the work- 
ing out of the problem. Every successive age has had its problem. There 
have been problems of practical living, involving methods of work, tools and 
manual training ; there have been political problems, involving education in 
self-restraint, recognition of orderly procedure, the slow working out of the prin- 
ciples of representation, the federal idea and the idea of democratic rule ; there 
have been religious problems, involving the discernment of moral standards and 
laws, the clarification of the idea of deity ; there have been intellectual problems, 
involving the patient study of the phenomena of mind, the slow discernment of 
the laws of mental action. These problems, and many others akin to them, 
have been slowly and painfully worked out by successive ages and different 
races. The latest of all these problems to receive full and adequate attention 



846 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

is that which involves the adjustment of the relations of man to man. This is 
naturally the last in the order of time, because it is the last in the order of devel- 
opment. Men must first learn how to support life, to live peacefully together 
in communities, to know the workings of their minds, to recognize a higher 
power and a moral order, before they arrive at the stage in which each man is, 
in the true sense, a law unto himself, and in which, by reason of knowledge of 
the intricate relationships of each man and woman with all other men and 
women, and by reason of a recognition of the sanctity and inviolability of the 
individual soul and life, a real and permanent community of all human beings is 
possible. 

In the fullness of time, and at the ripe historic moment, this problem has 
come into our hands for solution, and we are to determine whether, on a free 
and open field, and under the most flexible political institutions, white and 
black, Englishman, German, Frenchman, Scandinavian, Oriental, and Occi- 
dental, Catholic, Protestant, and Agnostic, can live together harmoniously, suc- 
cessfully, and permanently. More than this, having gotten these races together 
and made harmony between them, we are to determine what are to be the 
industrial and social relations between man and man. On this continent, for 
the first time in the history of the world, there is secured a perfectly free field 
for social and industrial evolution. The political equality and freedom from 
class restrictions of every kind, for which the colonists successfully contended, 
seemed to them ultimate and final achievements ; these rights secured, per- 
manent peace and prosperity were inevitable. So it seemed to them, and they 
were not entirely mistaken ; that which they achieved was a lasting contribution 
to the progress and prosperity of the race ; but it did not mark the final attain, 
ment of society ; it was but another step in the evolution which is being accom- 
plished in history. 

We, of a later generation, have learned that there are no finalities of 
human achievement ; no sooner do we climb one peak than another rises before 
us. No sooner was political liberty secured than Americans began to discover 
that other and more difficult problems awaited solution. Political liberty was a 
preliminary step toward social and industrial liberty ; we have secured the right 
conditions ; the question which now confronts us is whether we can solve the 
human problem ? On this open field can we adjust the relations of man to man 
and secure sound, flexible, just, and permanent relations between men through- 
out the entire social organism ? 

This is a deeper and a more complex problem than that of governmental 
form ; for, after all, governments are means to ends and not ends in themselves. 
It is the belief that free government means more general happiness and a wider 
diffusion of independent and self-sustaining character than either monarchy or 
aristocracy, that has given it such a hold on the modern imagination. It is 



SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS. 847 

ck-ar, now, that the questions before us are even more difficult and perplexing 
than were the questions which our ancestors of Colonial and Revolutionary 
times were compelled to answer. The political problem is much simpler than 
the industrial problem ; indeed, it simply prepares the way tor dealing- with the 
industrial problem. There is more, however, in our political problem than ap- 
pears on the surface ; more than most of our earlier political thinkers discerned. 
The majority of the men who established the government believed in the rule of 
the select classes, and looked forward to the supreme influence of the educated, 
cultivated, and socially well-to-do people in the State. The New England town- 
meeting was democratic, but it was a democracy which followed the lead of the in- 
tellectual and social leaders of the community; the old system of parish govern- 
ment made the influence of a lew families supreme. There was no radical 
democracy in this country until long after the Revolution, and had most of the 
statesmen of that day discerned the deeper drift of the currents they would 
have shrunk back in dismay from the working out of the democratic idea. They 
looked for the rule of the best intellectually and socially ; they anticipated that 
the management of affairs would remain in the hands of men of training in 
public life, and that in this country, as in England, the government would be 
a government of those favorably placed men who are, in the old sense of the 
word, gentlemen, lefferson and a few other men of strong popular instinct and 
insight saw more truly and more widely, but even they did not and could not 
foresee how radical was to be the democratic experiment in this country, and to 
how tremendous a strain the institutions established by their wisdom were to be 
subjected. 

For the government of the country has passed from the hands of the 
fortunately placed few into the hands of the multitude, who are bearing the heat 
and burden of the hard and heavy work of life. There was a shudder in polite 
circles when fackson's accession to the Presidency brought to Washington, and, 
in many cases, into important positions, a class of people who had hitherto kept 
mainly in the background. The end of all political systems ought to be to 
bring the best men to the front, but the ideal of the best man has suffered great 
change and modification. The best man in a democratic community may be a 
very different man from the best man in an aristocratic community, and yet be a 
better man. Mr. Lincoln, the child of democratic conditions, fills a larger place 
in modern history, and is altogether a nobler figure from every point of view, 
than Lord Salisbury, who is an admirable product of aristocratic conditions. 
But even in democratic communities the democratic idea is very slowly appre- 
hended, and we are just beginning to understand how radical a departure we 
are making from the old standards and ideas, and how great an experiment our 
ancestors inaugurated on this continent when they threw all the gates open and 
made every man a voter. The force of habit and the power of tradition made 
it easy, for a time, for the trained men to lead ; but the unthinking classes 



THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA. 849 

became more and more the thinking' classes, and the great multitude who had 
been content to delegate their power, slowly awoke to a consciousness of the 
possession of that power and to a determination to exercise it directly. As a 
result we are coming to have a genuine rule of the people for the people. 
The trained man has not disappeared from public life, but he is no longer in 
control of it ; the ignorant voter counts for as much as the intelligent voter, and 
the penniless voter for as much as the rich voter. In a society in which the men 
specially trained for public affairs must always constitute a very small minority, 
we have committed unrestricted power to an immense constituency of untrained 
men, who naturally choose their representatives from among their own number ; 
and in a community in which the few are rich and the many comparatively poor 
we have placed the guardianship of property and the legal control of every 
sort of financial organization in the hands of the comparatively poor many. 
Never was there a bolder or more radical experiment. All the old safeguards 
of wealth and privilege have been removed ; these things are now committed 
entirely to the integrity and self-rule of the community. 

So far no country has been safer for property interests. Important modi- 
fications have been made in the management of great properties and in the con- 
ditions under which wealth is accumulated, and greater modifications are certain 
to be made. We are passing through an industrial revolution, but, owing to the 
very conditions which seem so perilous, that revolution promises to be one of 
peace. The farmer, dependent upon the railroad for access to his market, is a 
voter as well as a farmer, and as a voter he compels a certain consideration 
of his needs at the hands of the railroads. The miners, mill-operators, railroad 
employees, and working-men of every class are voters and constitute an immense 
political force in society ; as voters they demand and secure the most favorable 
conditions for their work. There has been injustice done to capitalists and 
corporations in many cases, but such injustice is always incident to radical 
modifications of industrial conditions ; on the whole, the results have been bene- 
ficial to all classes. An industrial aristocracy cannot be permanently main- 
tained under a political democracy ; sooner or later a political democracy will 
compel harmonious industrial adjustment. This does not mean that socialism 
is to be the fruit of our democratic system ; it does mean that, industrially, as 
well as politically, we are to have a free, open field, with as near an approach to 
equal chances for all men at the start as can be secured. To this approximate 
equalization of industrial conditions, without sacrificing that pronounced indi- 
viduality and deep-seated personal independence which are characteristic of the 
genuine American everywhere, our ancestors committed us when they lodged 
political power in the hands of all men simply as men, without reference to 
training, condition, or character. They not only prepared the field for deal- 
ing with the industrial problem, but they made it inevitable. 

54 



850 THE STORY OF AMERICA. 

Human nature is on trial on this continent as it has never been on trial 
elsewhere, and if it breaks down here there will be small hope for it elsewhere. 
If, under the conditions which have been secured here, men cannot be self- 
restrained, orderly, industrious, and progressive, they may wisely put them- 
selves under such masters as they can find and become servants again, and 
remain servants until the end of time. Our system makes a bold break from 
all past systems based on the idea that men need to be coerced into doing 
right, and plants itself fully and unreservedly on the belief that men, under 
conditions which develop manhood, will be both self-respecting and self-govern- 
ing. A thoughtful and inspiring teacher of this generation has put the 
American political idea effectively and simply : — 

What shall be the policy of a great nation in its dealing with the question of taxation? 
Ought we to throw our ports open to all the imports of the world ? Ought we to close them, and 
by our system of taxation protect and foster our own manufactures and our own industries? The 
educated men, professors in our universities, men who have given their life to the study of 
economic problems, differ in their judgment on this subject ; but it is not left to experts, to 
learned men, to Senators or Representatives to decide. It is to be determined at the polls by 
the common people, by men who can read and men who cannot read, by men who are intelligent 
and men who are not intelligent, by men who are virtuous and men who are not virtuous, by men 
who are patriotic and men who are not patriotic ; the whole great mass of American people are to 
determine this question. Is this, as Carlyle and Ruskin aver, absurd? It can be defended only 
on the broad ground that men are the children of God, and that by their own blunders they are 
climbing their way up the hill of wisdom. 

In this sublime idea, this spirit of faith in man and in God, consists the true greatness of this 
country ; and in this is the secret of its history. What is the object of government? Is it to give 
the worthy and the well-to-do a comfortable and easy time? Then we may well question whether 
democratic government is the best. Or is it to develop manhood? Is it to make men and 
women ? Then unroll the hundred pages we have written through pain and travail, and tell 
what other hundred years in the history of the world disclose such an educational influence 
wrought in any nation. Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Clay, Webster, 
Sumner, Seward, Chase, Lincoln, Grant — what other hundred years of Italy, of Germany, of 
France, or of England shines with such a constellation ? Or turn to great movements not inaugu- 
rated by men of genius, but born of the impulses of the common people. The movement that 
issued in the American Revolution and in the Declaration of Independence was a great popular 
movement ; men that seemed to lead were pushed on from behind. The great Anti-Slavery move- 
ment was a great popular movement, not wanting, it is true, in leaders, nevertheless a great move- 
ment of common people pushing on the leaders. It was the conscience of the common people, 
rising in its wrath, that thrust Tweed out of power, and will thrust his successors in city, State, and 
Nation. The Nation has been great in the individual men it has developed ; it has been even 
greater in the popular movements which have marked its history. If we count nations as schools, 
we belong to a school that has learned more in a century than has ever been taught in any school 
in the history of the world, and America is greatest among God's schools. 

The story of America as recorded in this volume is the story of this experi- 
ment, the history of this great school. Mistakes and sins are not absent from 
that story ; jobbery, corruption, demagogism and materialism are not absent to- 



THE STORY OF THIS EXPERIMENT. 



851 



day. Our safety lies not in the care with which evils are guarded against by our 
system, but in the very audacity of our experiment. We are constantly com- 
pelled to recognize and discuss our dangers and our blunders, and this frankness 
and courage are great elements of safety. We have finished nothing as yet ; 
we have finally solved no problems ; we are a great school ; we are learning, test- 
ing, experimenting. Human nature is on trial here, and because it is on trial it is 
showing all its various sides ; its ignoble, sordid, mean, quite as distinctly as its 
great and aspiring qualities. In a school no one looks for perfection ; one looks 
only for progress and promise. To one who looks patiently and dispassionately 
both these qualities are found on this continent as they are found nowhere else. 
We have not achieved the highest things as yet, but we are on the way to achieve 
them. " Here let there be what the earth waits for — exalted manhood. What 
this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its material- 
ities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man 
corn." 

Hamilton W. Mabie. 




WAREHOUSE OF MARSHALL FIELD, CHICAGO, ILL. (H. H. RICHARDSON, ARCHITECT; COMPLETED I1Y HIS SUCCESSORS, 

SHI Pl.EY, KUTTAN !c COOLIDGE.) 



w 



